“Guess they didn’t do any more repairing than they had to while they lived there or it wouldn’t be tumbling apart now,” he suggested as an explanation. His eyes rested for a moment on the twisted bole of a gnarled oak and he thought he saw something move swiftly around its base, but he decided that it was probably a wild animal that had taken shelter there because of an instinctive confidence that its haunts would not be molested.
Caldwell had witnessed the ignominious capture of the older man and the unceremonious retreat of Arthur Junior, who had fled the country without stopping to lock the place or make provisions for the hundreds of head of stock which roamed the range. Humane ranchers had driven the cattle to shelter, and Bob knew that the sheriff or some of his assistants occasionally patroled the property on watch for signs of the return of young Gordon or any of his associates, but so far the place had been shunned by members of the gang as if it were plague stricken.
“At that, some of them might make it a hang-out as soon as they think people have forgotten or are too busy to keep an eye on it.” He noted the rugged cliffs which rose like irregular saw-teeth and curved around sharply, like a protecting elbow. “From the ground the place isn’t easy to reach without being observed. Well, what a nice little scare-cat I’m getting to be,” he upbraided himself as he resolutely put the glasses into their case and turned his attention to the business of flying.
Bob Caldwell was the younger member of the Flying Buddies and he was returning from a hop in Her Highness to Crofton where he had done errands for his mother and picked up the mail for the three adjoining ranches above the Gordon’s on Cap Rock; his own, the Cross-Bar on the Pearl River; the K-A which was the Austin’s and his home; and Don Haurea’s of the Box-Z. The recollection of the stirring events and the eerie atmosphere about the lonely ranch made him turn the plane’s nose toward the blue dome of northwestern Texas until its magnitude and beauty enabled him to dismiss the sense of impending danger.
“We are all as safe as if we were in church,” he grinned cheerfully, then, as the altitude meter read twenty thousand feet, he leveled off, and shot north. At the boy’s right stretched the seemingly endless miles of level plain under an almost unbroken expanse of pure white, while at his left below the great ledge lay miles and miles of sharp hills, narrow valleys, and in the distance the Pearl River bottom. Presently he saw the timber line bounding the south of the K-A.