long walk ahead of you. If you want to get home before dark you'll have to step lively."
"They'll get theirselves loose, Bill," remarked Turk, who had had time to think. "One'll ontie the other with his teeth an' mos' likely, bein' hard headed gents, they'll come right back."
"Since I've got something else to do besides play tag with them," grunted Steele, "they might as well know that if they come back looking for trouble they'll get it hot out of a rifle barrel. If your outfit is looking for that kind of a fight all you've got to do is come after it. As for untying one another … I'd thought of that. Keep your eye on the three of them, Turk."
He set down his gun, unsnapped his belt hatchet, and stepped into the nearest clump of young firs. It was short work to lop down a slender thirty-foot-high tree, and rudely trim it of branches. Turk, allowed to give but a questioning glance sidewise, was moved to wonder. But he understood in a moment and testified his delight with a gurgle of mirth.
"Goin' home tandem!" he chuckled into Pete Olsen's empurpled face. "Didn't know when I was breakin' you to ride that we was figgerin' on workin' you in harness too, did you, Pete? Haw!"
For the rest was simplicity itself. First under Johnnie Thorp's right arm was the long pole slipped until half of its length had passed by him. Then Steele's own fingers made Thorp's wrist fast to the sapling with a bit of rope, so that he might reach neither the heavy end in front of him nor the lopped off end
