"He sure ought to," Eddie replied emphatically. "Boise belongs to Sis, by rights. The mare got killed and Dad gave him to Sis when he was a suckin' colt, and Sis raised him on cow's milk and broke him herself. She rode him all over. Lew took and sold him to Dave, and gambled the money, and Sis never signed no bill of sale. They couldn't make her. Sis has got spunk, once you stir her up. She'll tackle anything.
She's always claimed Boise is hers. Boise knows the Gap like a book. Sis couldn't get off the trail if she rode him."
"Something happened, then," Bud muttered stubbornly. "Four men came through behind us, and we waited out in the dark to let them pass. Then she sent me down to the creek-bottom, and she turned back. If they got her--" He turned Sunfish in the narrow brush trail. "She's hurt, or they got her--I'm going back!" he said grimly.
"Hell! you can't do any good alone," Eddie protested, coming after him. "We'll go look for her, Mr. Birnie, but we've got to have something so we can see. If. Jerry could dig up a couple of lanterns--"
"You wait. I'm coming along," Jerry called guardedly. "I'll bring lanterns."
To Bud that time of waiting was torment. He had faced danger and tragedy since he could toddle, and fear had never overridden the titillating sense of adventure. But then the danger had been for himself. Now terror conjured pictures whose horror set him trembling. Twenty-four hours and more had passed since he had kissed Marian's hand and let her go--to what? The inky blackness of those tunnelled caverns in the Gap confronted his mind like a nightmare. He could not speak of it--he dared not think of it, and yet he must.
Jerry came on horseback, with three unlighted lanterns held in a cluster by their wire handles. Eddie immediately urged his horse into the brushy edge of the trail so that he might pass Bud and take the lead. "You sure made quick time," he remarked approvingly to Jerry.
"I raided Dave's cache of whiskey or I'd have been here quicker," Jerry explained. "We might need some."
Bud gritted his teeth. "Ride, why don't yuh?" he urged Eddie harshly. "What the hell ails that horse of yours ? You got him hobbled?"
Eddie glanced back over his bobbing shoulder as his horse trotted along the blind trail through the brush. "This here ain't no race track," he expostulated. "We'll make it quicker without no broken legs."
There was justice in his protest and Bud said nothing. But Sunfish's head bumped the tail of Eddie's horse many times during that ride. Once in the Gap, with a lighted lantern in his rein hand and his six-shooter in the other--because it was ticklish riding, in there with lights revealing them to anyone who might be coming through--he was content to go slowly, peering this way and that as he rode.
Once Eddie halted and turned to speak to them. "I know Boise wouldn't leave the trail. If Sis had to duck off and hide from somebody, he'd come back to the trail. Loose, he'd do that. Sis and I used to explore around in here just for fun, and kept it for our secret till Lew found out. She always rode Boise. I'm dead sure he'd bring her out all right."
"She hasn't come out--yet. Go on," said Bud, and Eddie rode forward obediently.
