Night overtook them, and they went into the foothills to camp close to water. Next morning, as early as they could see, they were away again. They trailed the roan and the pinto mare into the mountains, and eventually found the unsaddled horses, still showing evidences of their hard trip, in the meadow on the mountaintop. But here the trail played out abruptly.
On every side of the meadow they searched through the timber diligently, but found absolutely nothing to signify which way the fugitives had gone after deserting their horses.
Then at dusk some one turned over a pile of brush and found the saddles.
It was too late to proceed farther that night, so they repaired to a mountain lake to camp until morning. Meantime, Indian trailers were on the way to them from beyond Opaco—experts whom the sheriff had often employed, sharp-eyed aborigines who could detect signs of a person’s progress where a white man would see nothing.
These arrived at dark. And in the event that they should fail, Squawtooth had sent a messenger to the resorts on the coast side of the mountains to telephone the sheriff for the county bloodhounds—highly bred dogs that had been known to pick up a man’s trail twenty hours old.
But this night came the expected windstorm.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE WINDSTORM
IN the mountains the storm developed a stunning downpour of rain such as only the West experiences. Down on the desert there was no rain whatever, but the wind blew with such terrific force as to flatten many of the railroad camps, whirl desert cabins around, carry away chimneys, and send a sand storm raging over the level stretches which was more than cruel to man and beast. Down there men staggered around in the blackness, their shelter swept from over their heads, their eyes and teeth filled with sand—a scene of turmoil and intense discomfort if not of actual suffering. Up in the altitudes the search party was soaked to the skin, their supplies were ruined, their stock stampeded, and the rain eventually turned to a wet snow, with the temperature lowering fast, while always the terrific wind blew and swept all movable obstacles before it. All traces of the fugitives’ flight would be wiped out. Neither Indians nor keen-nosed bloodhounds would be of any avail when the storm had passed. To search while it raged was a hopeless task, if not impossible. The telephone wires running out of the mountains were down, and so no word came from the sheriff after he had started with the dogs. Squawtooth Canby was the picture of discouragement.
And through it all, the only two in the entire country who were not drenched and half frozen or robbed of shelter and stung by particles of sand were Manzanita and Falcon the Flunky, who sat huddled comfortably in their blankets, under the protection of an overhanging rock, and talked and laughed and told each other how she or he had felt when she or he first began to realize that life would be a wretched drag of time without the other’s love.
“Isn’t this just great!” shouted the girl above the roar of the storm.