As the sound of the voice died away, Bud touched King’s flank with the spurs. The big horse, after a day in the stable, was impatient and eager for a run, and he swept past the scattered buildings of the ranch with long, swift leaps that took him out upon the plains before Keats could complete his search of the first floor of the house. The two men who had searched the upper floor came downstairs, to meet Keats in the front room. They grimly shook their heads at Keats, and at his orders went outside to search with the other men. Keats stepped to the door, saw Marion sitting limply in the rocking-chair, her shoulders convulsed with sobs, and crossed to her, shaking her with a brutal arm. “Where’s that guy I left standin’ there? Where’s he—Hemmingway?” “I don’t know,” said the girl dully. Keats cursed and ran to the edge of the porch. With his gaze sweeping the buildings, the pasture, the corrals, and the wide stretch of plain westward, he stiffened, calling angrily to his men: “There he goes—damn him! It’s that sneakin’ Bud Hemmingway, an’ he’s gone to tell Taylor we’re after him! He knows where Taylor is! Get your hosses!” Forced to her feet by the intense activity that followed Keats’s loudly bellowed orders, the girl crossed the porch, and from a point near the end railing watched Keats and his men clamber into their saddles and race after Bud. For a long time she watched them—a tiny blot gliding over the plains, followed by a larger blot—and then she walked slowly to the rocking-chair, looked down at it as though its spaciousness invited her; then she turned from it, entered the house, and going to her room—where Martha was sleeping—began feverishly throwing her few belongings into the small handbag she had brought with her from the big house. CHAPTER XXVI—KEATS FINDS “SQUINT” Looking back after he had been riding for some minutes, Bud saw a dozen or more horses break from the group of Arrow buildings and come racing toward him, spreading out fanwise. “They’ve seen me!” breathed Bud, and he leaned over King’s shoulders and spoke to him. The animal responded with a burst of speed that brought a smile to Bud’s face. For the puncher knew that Taylor and Norton couldn’t have traveled more than a few miles in the short time that had passed since their departure; and he knew also that in a short run—of a dozen miles or so—there wasn’t a horse in the Dawes section that could catch King, barring, of course, Spotted Tail, the real king of range horses. And so Bud bent eagerly to his work, not riding erect in the saddle as is the fashion of the experienced cow-puncher in an unfamiliar country, where pitfalls, breaks, draws, hidden gullies, and weed-grown barrancas provide hazards that might bring disaster. Bud knew this section of the country as well as he knew the interior of the bunkhouse, and with his knowledge came a confidence that nothing would happen to him or King, except possibly a slip into a gopher hole.