“He can’t see us,” Steve said. “Just a few hundred yards more, Pitch—then we’ll look again. We should be well downwind from him by then.”

Pitch grunted in response, and Steve hurried forward faster than ever. His thoughts turned from the Piebald to Flame. He still had to figure out how to swing the stallion clear of the pit. He had thought of a few ways but had discarded them. Suddenly he said, “You’ve got your rope, haven’t you, Pitch?”

“Yeah,” Pitch replied shortly; then after a pause, “You’re sure we ought to go through with this, Steve? I don’t like being down here. What if the Piebald turns on us? Let him be their leader. Why risk our lives to save that red stallion? I really don’t see what difference it makes who leads this band. And I don’t understand what you mean when you say that it does.”

Steve didn’t answer and they walked on until the hollow was but a quarter of a mile below them.

“We’ll look for the Piebald now,” Steve said, “and then beat it for the marsh.” When he turned around, Pitch’s head was already above the cane.

“They’ve moved more to the center of the valley,” Pitch whispered excitedly, ducking his head again and turning to the boy. “And there’s a couple of them not more than a hundred yards away!”

Steve, raising his head slowly above the cane, saw that the Piebald and his band had moved a little closer to them, as Pitch had said. But the black-and-white stallion was still grazing and didn’t appear to be suspicious of anything. The two horses that had moved away from the band and were grazing nearby were a bay mare and her stilt-legged foal. Steve felt that the chances of the Piebald’s coming over were slim unless the mare squealed.

Steve knew that he should hide below the cane again, but momentarily his eyes rested upon the foal, watching the young colt as he vigorously encircled his mother, seeking her long black tail and shaking mane for protection against the flies that bothered him. He couldn’t be more than a couple of weeks old, Steve figured. Noting the colt’s perfect wedge-shaped head, he thought of Flame. Surely this foal had been sired by the red stallion. There were many like him in the band.

“What are you doing?” Pitch asked nervously. “See anything? Let’s get going, if we’re going on!” His head too had risen above the cane beside Steve’s.