Читать книгу Hands Up! онлайн

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Within one minute the "Dago Push" was in full flight round the bend, campwards. Within the hour, with Douglas unconscious across the saddle, my splendid ally and I came into Black Kettle. The friendly Dago, we suggested, should accompany us. But no—he said he would be all right with the gang and so, as he spoke as one who knew, we did not urge him to come with us. We came to Black Kettle, which clustered there, oblivious of all things at the foot of the benches, in the sunlight and sand. Looking round for sign of any inhabitants I saw, on this occasion, what I had never noticed before: corrals to South of the track, in a fold of the benches; and, standing in the centre of the little cluster of houses, upright in the sand, a couple of hitching posts with rings in their tops. Strange that I had not noticed them before. I suppose I had been so possessed of my half panicky idea that there was nothing in the country but the railroad that those two signs simply whispered to me in vain—of ranches backward in the hills, and horsemen, sometimes at least, riding into town from somewhere.