I went back to camp and stuck to work for the rest of that week--until some of the boys told me that they had seen the Kings' guests scooting across the prairie in the big touring-car of Weaver's, evidently headed for Helena. After that I got restless again, and every mile the round-up moved south I took as a special grievance; it put that much greater distance between me and King's Highway--and I had got to that unhealthy stage where every mile wore on my nerves, and all I wanted was to moon around that little butte. I believe I should even have taken a morbid pleasure in watching the light in her window o' nights, if it had been at all practicable. CHAPTER VIII A Fight and a Race for Life. It was between the spring round-up and the fall, while the boys were employed in desultory fashion at the home ranch, breaking in new horses and the like, and while I was indefatigably wearing a trail straight across country to that little butte--and getting mighty little out of it save the exercise and much heart-burnings--that the message came. A man rode up to the corrals on a lather-gray horse, coming from Kenmore, where was a telephone-station connected from Osage. I read the message incredulously. Dad sick unto death? Such a thing had never happened--_couldn't_ happen, it seemed to me. It was unbelievable; not to be thought of or tolerated. But all the while I was planning and scheming to shave off every superfluous minute, and get to where he was. I held out the paper to Perry Potter, "Have some one saddle up Shylock," I ordered, quite as if he had been Rankin. "And Frosty will have to go with me as far as Osage. We can make it by to-morrow noon--through King's Highway. I mean to get that early afternoon train." The last sentence I sent back over my shoulder, on my way to the house. Dad sick--dying? I cursed the miles between us. Frisco was a long, a terribly long, way off; it seemed in another world. By then I was on my way back to the corral, with a decent suit of clothes on and a few things stuffed into a bag, and with a roll of money--money that I had earned--in my pocket. I couldn't have been ten minutes, but it seemed more. And Frisco was a long way off! "You'd better take the rest of the boys part way," Potter greeted dryly as I came up. I brushed past him and swung up into the saddle, feeling that if I stopped to answer I might be too late. I had a foolish notion that even a long breath would conspire to delay me. Frosty was already on his horse, and I noticed, without thinking about it at the time, that he was riding a long-legged sorrel, "Spikes," that could match Shylock on a long chase--as this was like to be.