grub, took off the bridle it had worn since he hitched it to the sapling before going out on that spying expedition which had turned things loose like the stove-in head of a barrel. Some of the horses were lying down, others standing in little groups, heads over each other's backs in the companionable way of horses, take them where found, world without end.
The fast-broadening day discovered to Simpson that he was out of sight of the timber, in a country where laminated ledges of limestone cropped from the ribs of lean hills, with little swales where grass grew abundantly. It was in one of these that he had stopped. Brier clumps and stunted sumac bushes grew along the hillside, suggesting fuel, fire and hot coffee.
The time he would lose getting breakfast would not put him very far along the road, and if Wade Harrison's men were on his trail they'd overtake him before he could get out of there, hungry or fed. A hungry man will argue down almost any kind of danger, and Simpson was a hungry man.
He splintered some dead sumac, which is a wood that blazes quickly, and comes nearer to burning without smoke than any wood that grows, kindling a fire without much difficulty. He was so reckless and defiant of danger in his famished state that he stirred up a mess of biscuits, there being no trouble finding water for mixing his dough or filling his coffee pot, for every wash was a little torrent after the rain, some of them running as clear as if they had their founts in springs, which is the way of prairie run-off water, as every Kansas pioneer well knows.
Not more than three-quarters of an hour later Simpson,
