a ways and see if we can find where they dumped him. If he was dead they wouldn't carry him far. You'd better bring your gun along."
Simpson preferred a rifle for such scouting expeditions, it appeared, a choice of weapons which met the sheriff's approval and lifted the stranger a notch in his esteem. The sheriff said a buckboard would be somewhat out of order for such business, and requested the loan of a horse. It happened that Simpson had a number of animals in the corral, with the purpose in mind to try some of them out in harness, few on the place having been broken to work. He saddled two likely ones, using the saddle he had borrowed from Coburn for himself.
As they started down the road in the direction the raiders had gone three days before, the sheriff said they'd make inquiries of the homesteaders in the valley below the Ellison place, meantime keeping an eye on the road to see if they could discover where the gang had turned out of it. If Harrison had been wounded and not killed they would head right on to Drumwell and a doctor. Otherwise they would leave the road to dispose of their burden somewhere.
"If we can find that feller's carcase you're in for a handy little piece of money," he said. "There's twenty-five hundred to three thousand dollars reward out for that man. But we've got to find the corpus delicti; you can't prove a thing without the corpus delicti."
The sheriff was proud of his coroner's Latin, and was evidently innocent of any misapplication of the term in the present case. Although it was not exactly complimentary to Simpson, he knew the sheriff did not mean
