CHAPTER XXIII

SUSPICION IS RIFE

Teddy Ford and Oriole were not the only two persons about the ranch who suspected that Hank Ridley and his mates were at the bottom of the loss of the twenty-two horses driven away the night before.

There was another couple that began to question--themselves and each other. At last there was something in common between the brusque Sadie Brown and the generous-hearted George Belden.

"Tell you what it is, man," said the nurse, for once not trying to drive the foreman out of her presence when he first appeared, "there was something funny about those two fellows riding so hard up that canyon the other night. I felt it then, and I know it now."

"I was thinking of that. Ridley has a bad reputation. So has Mudd. We know about some doings of theirs up in Shoshone Gap a year ago. It leaked through lately that they were suspected of rustling."

"I shouldn't wonder," said Nurse Brown. "And that Shaffer is no better. He ain't crazy none, either. Bet he has been trying to double-cross his friends in something."

"Sounds right sensible to me, Sadie."

"I hope so," she said scornfully. "It's lucky somebody has some horse sense about this ranch."

Belden nodded cheerful agreement. His opinion of the woman was very high indeed, and he was always ready to admit it.

"Now, see here," Miss Brown continued. "Harvey Langdon and Sol and the other fellows have all gone pirooting off on the trail of those horses. Good enough, that is. But the horse thieves have got more than twelve hours' start like enough. How about heading them off?"

"I can take a bunch and do it," said Belden promptly. "You say which way they are headin', that's all."

"The way Hank and Mudd were heading the other night. Through Squaw Canyon. And I bet Shaffer had gone on ahead of them, even if we didn't notice his trail."

"Sounds reasonable," agreed Belden. "I'll find some of the boys and get a move on."

"And I'm going to go over that way myself and see what comes of it," said the energetic woman. "I'll take the twins along in the cart, and that Teddy Ford to drive them. But I want to be astride a horse myself."

Sadie Brown rode anything on four legs (so she said herself), and the horses she chose were not like Molly or old Blooey, the pony which drew the twins in the cart. It rankled in Teddy Ford's mind that she should be so well mounted when they set forth from the ranch house, while he had to drive "a dead and alive pony" as he disrespectfully spoke of Blooey.

Belden and the men he had picked up around the bunk houses and corrals had already ridden out of sight when the pony phaeton started with Nurse Brown riding beside it. Where Oriole had disappeared to neither the twins nor their nurse thought to ask. Teddy refrained from saying anything about her, for she had ridden away without explaining a word to him of her intentions.

He had no expectation of his slow party getting anywhere near the goal. George Belden and his men were out of sight long before the slow Blooey and Miss Brown's fretting steed had come to the mouth of Squaw Canyon. Indeed, by watching the trail, Teddy knew that Belden's party had not come this way at all. The foreman evidently considered some other way into the hills as more feasible if they were really to overtake the horse thieves.

Not for a moment did anybody embarked upon this hunt for the outlaws suspect that Oriole was calmly riding into the grave danger of meeting at least one of the men suspected. The girl was so eager to help Teddy and discover the criminals who had stolen the ranchman's plate that she suspected no danger before her. She rode calmly on into the wilderness.

It was long after noon when she first halted up in the hills far above the bed of Squaw Canyon where she had been with the fishing party two days before. Because she was not retarded by the slow-moving phaeton, she had come much faster than before.

Indeed, she had pushed Molly to the brim of the basin, about which the wooded tops of the Three Sisters loomed quite majestically. Here Oriole allowed her horse to graze. She had no lunch herself and really was not hungry, her interest in what she saw was so intense.

She observed no sign of the man who she was sure had camped so recently beside the stream she had followed. But while she sat searching the great valley with her eyes, a number of moving objects wheeling out of a ravine some miles away stirred the girl's imagination.

Were they cattle--a herd strayed from some greater band from the distant range? Oriole narrowed her lids that her half-dazzled eyes might the better mark the moving figures.

Then suddenly, by their tossing heads and their gait, she realized that it was a band of horses trotting out into the open plain. Behind them spurred two riders.

It needed no diagram to convince Oriole that she was looking at the stolen twenty-two horses; and evidently the men who had stolen them numbered two. Teddy and she had been right in their suspicions. She was sure now that Ridley and Mudd were the two thieves. Shaffer could not be with them. Indeed, that individual, whether he were out of his mind or not, she was confident was on her side of this great valley.

She looked to see that Molly could not be observed where she was grazing. Oriole knew that her own location must be hidden from the men driving the horse herd. She felt no fear, for they were many miles away.

Suddenly, as she saw the two riders drive the herd rapidly across the plain, there came several spurts of smoke from the mouth of that ravine out of which the herd had come. The two men with the horses began to fire their pistols as well. There came into view more than half a dozen swift riders, and the pistol battle became general.

"Oh, they are Mr. Langdon and the boys!" gasped the frightened Oriole. "It must be them! And somebody will be hurt!"

The antagonists were too far away at the time, however, for certain pistol shooting. There was a good deal of powder burned during the next few minutes, but nobody appeared to be hurt.

However, the Three-bar men rode more swiftly than the outlaws could drive the stolen horses. They caught up to the terrified steeds. Meanwhile the two evident thieves (whether they were Ridley and Mudd or not) were driven off. They spurred their mounts, lying close along their necks, and left the recovered horses and the posse behind.

"Oh, dear me! are they going to get away?" gasped Oriole, staring from her hiding place behind a hedge of thorny scrub oak. "Why doesn't Mr. Langdon stop them?"

She did not wish to see the escaping men shot down. That was too terrible a thought. But she felt that they should be overtaken and punished in some way.

The men from the Three-bar Ranch, however, were much too interested at the moment in securing the scattered horses. They had to be ridden down and roped in some cases, and then driven to a central place. The first thought of the ranchman and his aids, of course, was the value of the twenty-two mounts.

Before the horses were all secured the two thieves were far across the basin. And they were riding in a direction that brought them toward Oriole. The girl did not at first realize that. When she did, it was too late for her to mount Molly and try to run away.

Instead, she crept on her hands and knees as swiftly as she could travel in that posture along the hedge to the place where Molly grazed. She secured the reins, put the bit again in the pony's mouth, and almost dragged her into a thicket where they both might be hidden from the approaching outlaws.

The two men came at a pounding gallop, evidently knowing well the branch canyon up which Oriole had so recently climbed. Before they were very near the girl realized that her suspicion as to their identity had not been false.

Hank Ridley, the black-mustached and red-faced fellow, and his comrade named Mudd were the identical men who had tried to run off Mr. Langdon's horses. If they would steal horses, they surely would steal silver plate! Oriole wished Mr. Langdon was at hand so that she might point out this fact to him.

But she believed he was with the posse miles across the green basin. The men there had gathered together the frightened herd. They were conferring. Finally she saw that they intended to drive back the stolen horses by the way they had come and would not follow the two rascals at all.

This fact surprised Ridley and Mudd as much as it did the watching girl. But they were more keenly apprehensive than was Oriole of what probably was the fact.

"No, Mudd. No chance of them giving us freedom. They are just foolin' about this."

"How do you mean, foolin'?" demanded the other man, likewise pulling in his horse and staring back.

They were within earshot of Oriole. She eagerly listened.

"Mercy, what very bad men they are," murmured the girl to herself. "Why, I never knew people could be so wicked!"

It really was Oriole's first contact with real wickedness in any form, for the behavior of Shedder Crabbe, and even of his father, from which she had suffered during her stay in and near Littleport, was brought about by pettiness of character and lack of goodness rather than by active wickedness.

"I--I would like to run away," Oriole's thoughts ran on. "Only, on Teddy's account, I must stay to see if I cannot find out something."

"They ain't no idee of letting us go scot-free, I tell you," declared Hank Ridley. "That idee of yours was all right--going off with them horses. Only we couldn't hide our trail on that soft ground. But we ain't going to be let to stay free and easy up here. No, sir."

"I want to get at that old hole, Hank. I'm sick o' this delay--mighty sick. I don't know as I much blame Shaffer--if he did come up here alone."

"Well, believe me," snarled Ridley, "if he did or if he didn't, it ain't done him no good. He couldn't get into that shaft--no, sir."

"Why couldn't he?"

"'Cause after you fellers went that time, I pulled up the rope and hid it. And no man of your heft or Shaffer's would risk his neck on a lariat down that dog-awful hole," and Ridley chuckled.

"I declare!" exclaimed Mudd with admiration.

"When your Uncle Hank loses a point in the game, he's asleep or smothered or something. Shaffer may be up here; but he ain't got down that hole, you may be sure."

"Well, then----"

"And this ain't no place for us right now. Them fellers will be waiting back in that ravine, ready to ride out and get us if we durst to come back. We got to light out this way, make a big detour, and if things shape up right we'll sneak back to the basin here from the other side. That's all we can do. Come on, Mudd."

He jerked around his lathered horse and headed him right into the gulch through which Oriole had come in reaching the brim of the great basin. The outlaws were between her and the home trail!