"Mavy sent you this," he said with a grin. "Guess he's out on the trail again. He had the boys sitting up half last night at the Bluff Hotel."
"Thanks for the mower. Better go for it if you want the thing," it ran. "I'm off for a change of air, and haven't the least notion when I'm coming back. I've discovered that one has to get seasoned to a quiet life."
Going back into the house, he handed the note to his wife, who was sitting with Alison at breakfast, and she gave it to the girl in turn when she had read it.
"It's too bad, though I must say I expected it," she remarked, regarding her with reproachful eyes.
"If he has a singularly unbalanced nature, can I help it?" Alison asked.
"I don't know which to be most vexed with; you or Lucy. He would be quietly cutting prairie hay now if you had both left him alone."
"Mavy," he observed, "will in all probability require a good deal of breaking in; but that's no reason why one should despair of him. I've known a young horse turn out an excellent hauler and go steady as a rock in double harness, after in the first place kicking in the whole front of the wagon."
"Why double harness?" his wife inquired with a twinkle in her eyes.
"Well," replied Farquhar, "perhaps I was anticipating things."
He lounged out, and Alison went on with her breakfast with an expressionless face, though Mrs. Farquhar noticed that she seemed preoccupied after that.
Three or four days later Thorne sat on the veranda of a little wooden hotel after supper. A couple of men lounged near him smoking, and in front of them a double row of unpicturesque frame-houses straggled beside the trail that led straight as the crow flies into a waste of prairie.
"I've had a notion that Jake Winthrop would look in here," Thorne remarked presently.
One of his companions glanced round toward the house, but there did not seem to be anybody within hearing just then.
"He did," he confided. "Baxter once worked with him on the railroad, and Jake crawled up to the back of his shack at night. Baxter gave him a different hat and a jacket."
"That's quite right," said the other man. "I figured the troopers would know what he was wearing. I drove him quite a piece toward the railroad early in the morning, and I've a notion he got off with a freight-train that was taking a crowd of boys from down East to do something farther on up the track. If he did, he must have jumped off quietly when they stopped to let the Pacific express by. Next thing, two or three troopers turned up, and I guess they heard about the train and wired up the line; but they haven't got Winthrop yet. Corporal Slaney, who sent two of them south, is in the settlement now. He's plumb sure that Jake's hanging round here waiting to make a break for the U. S. boundary."