"How much do you think we ought to pay?" asked Dick. "Name a reasonable price and I may settle, just to avoid trouble, and not because I think I ought to pay."
"How about fifty dollars?" asked the cowboy with a shrewd look in his fishy, blue eyes.
"Cut it in half, and I may meet you," came from Dick. "He was no blue-ribbon animal."
The cowboy tried to argue, but the Rovers and their chums would not listen, and in the end Jim Jones said he would accept twenty-five dollars and let it go at that. He said he would have the steer carted away before night.
"Where do you come from?" asked Dick after paying over the money.
"From the Cassibel ranch, sixty miles northwest from here. I and my pard were driving some cattle to town, when this steer got scared at a rattlesnake and broke away."
"I don't blame him," said Fred. "I'd get scared at a rattlesnake, myself."
"Do you know the way to Mr. Carson Denton's plantation?" went on Dick.
"Sure."
"This is not the right trail, is it?"
"Not by a long shot. The right trail is four miles from here."
