would continue on in the belief that he had followed the road. In a country of shallow streams, there could be no great barriers between him and the Kansas line, even though he might strike rough going in cutting across.
Doubtless the road was the shortest way and the best, or the thieves would not have taken it. His chance reposed in the unusual, the unexpected. At the first break in the tangled woods that presented about dark, he would head that lead mare for the prairie, which he believed could not be many miles away.
The horses had worked off their exuberance of being freed from the close stable, something they were unused to and did not like. They had settled down to a trot which they could hold for hours. Simpson felt that he would be more than half way to the Kansas line, his danger diminished by just that much, if he could keep them at it that way until midnight, when he might stop for a few hours, even until daylight, then make a spurt for the finish.
Of course the line would not be any barrier against his pursuers, but there would be some chance of running across a cow-camp or a ranch where he might take refuge and find help. Down here in the Nation there was no likelihood 'of help from the cowboys handling the cattle on the leased lands. They would consider him a horsethief, very likely, and throw their lead at him rather than for him, according to what the sheriff had told him of the animosities and prejudices existing between ranchers and cowpunchers on the two sides of the line.
It would be a bad place, that timber, for a man's pursuers to overtake him, night or day. In the shooting that
