Chapter 8 - Page 2

we'll make time by taking it easy at first, and you'll get there just as soon." I knew he was right about it, and pulled Shylock down to the steady lope that was his natural gait. It was hard, though, to just "mosey" along as if we were starting out to kill time and earn our daily wage in the easiest possible manner. One's nerves demanded an unusual pace--a pace that would soothe fear by its very headlong race against misfortune.

Once or twice it occurred to me to wonder, just for a minute, how we should fare in King's Highway; but mostly my thoughts stuck to dad, and how it happened that he was "critically ill," as the message had put it. Crawford had sent that message; I knew from the precise way it was worded--Crawford never said sick--and Crawford was about as conservative a man as one could well be, and be human. He was as unemotional as a properly trained footman; Jenks, our butler, showed more feeling. But Crawford, if he was conservative, was also conscientious. Dad had had him for ten years, and trusted him a million miles farther than he would trust anybody else--for Crawford could no more lie than could the multiplication-table; if he said dad was "critically ill," that settled it; dad was. I used to tell Barney MacTague, when he thought it queer that I knew so little about dad's affairs, that dad was a fireproof safe, and Crawford was the combination lock. But perhaps it was the other way around; at any rate, they understood each other perfectly, and no other living man understood either.

The darkness flowed down over the land and hid the farther hills; the sky-line crept closer until White Divide seemed the boundary of the world, and all beyond its tumbled shade was untried mystery. Frosty, a shadowy figure rising and falling regularly beside me, turned his face and spoke again:

"We ought to make Pochette's Crossing by daylight, or a little after--with luck," he said. "We'll have to get horses from him to go on with; these will be all in, when we get that far."

"We'll try and sneak through the pass," I answered, putting unpleasant thoughts resolutely behind me. "We can't take time to argue the point out with old King."

"Sneak nothing," Frosty retorted grimly. "You don't know King, if you're counting on that."

I came near asking how he expected to get through, then; when I remembered my own spectacular flight, on a certain occasion, I felt that Frosty was calmly disowning our only hope.

We rode quietly into the mouth of King's Highway, our horses stepping softly in the deep sand of the trail as if they, too, realized the exigencies of the situation. We crossed the little stream that is the first baby beginning of Honey Creek--which flows through our ranch--with scarce a splash to betray our passing, and stopped before the closed gate. Frosty got down to swing it open,