"You must, Hoppy. I got a reputation that ’ll serve me with either honest men or thieves. I can’t come to no harm. ’Tother way, you might get hurt. Two of us can’t get away on them bronchs, they did too much to-day already. You ’ll have to go at a walk, if you do go. ’Course I don’t stop with that bunch ’less I has to. It’s that bag I ’m thinkin’ about, Hoppy. If I has to stop, you want to put as much ground as you can between them an’ you. I ’m d—d glad they did n’t see our fire." "All right, Tex. I gives you an hour. ’Tain’t more ’n a mile. Get a-goin’." Tex started away and Hopalong began to get ready for a possible flight. Even if Tex did return they might decide that another location for their camp would be healthier. As he fastened the saddles to the two animals they each turned and looked at him with a disgust as expressive as if spoken. Tex made for the spot from which the sounds had come, walking easily but silently, his form a mere shadow in the star-lit night and invisible on the lower levels, to which he carefully kept, at a distance of two hundred yards. At the end of ten minutes he was able to distinguish words and knew that Hoppy’s and his surmise had been correct: they had heard the singing of night riders around a herd. It was the un-called-for presence of a herd in this vicinity which, more than all else, had led Tex to insist upon the reconnoitre being left to him. "Honest men or thieves," he had said. He was very doubtful of finding honest men. Only the condition of the horses had checked him from advising a departure on suspicion. He was skulking along now, bent double; in his hand, the blade lying along his arm, was a knife such as few men in the West carried at that day and in the use of which Tex was unusually expert. It was entirely characteristic of him that he should possess such a weapon: silence in action is desired by the worst class of man, and Tex had been of that class before the enforced association of better men and the heroically magnanimous action of an opponent had changed him to the man he was. He slunk forward with the stealthy prowl of a wolf, glancing to right and left as he went, hoping to sight the camp of the cattlemen and get near enough without being seen, to learn what he had come to find out. He dropped flat to earth as a sudden snort startled him: he had come upon the herd without knowing it. A disquieted animal sprang to its feet and did not lie down again until the soothing voice of the herder was raised. The song floated down the wind and Tex listened as well as the cow: "’Now then, young men, don’t be melancholy; Just see, like me, if you can’t be jolly; If anything goes wrong with me I never sulk nor pout; In fact I am and always was The merriest girl that’s out.’"