Charlie stood a few minutes staring thoughtfully. He frowned into the pit. Few signs, but highly significant ones to him. Queer. Then he mounted his horse and back-tracked. He partly guessed what had made that whispering sound in the night. Now he desired to disprove or verify that guess.
That was what he had in mind when he loped back to where he took up this trail. By the bend of the grass blades he knew they had been dragged up that swale. Where there was an end, there must be a beginning. Charlie made a bet with himself that these marks would begin somewhere near the spot from which those shots had been fired at him.
He won his bet. The narrow swaths lay along the draw. The depression narrowed, then deepened. Charlie remembered then that a soak spring seeped out of a bank down there, affording water to a hundred head or so of stock. He recalled something else. Three years earlier a horse outfit had located on that spring and built a small corral there, part sod, part poles. Then they had abandoned the place for a better one, forty miles east.
He came around a low shoulder of hill. The old corral still stood. It was still in fair shape, and it had been in use. That was plain enough. The marks he had followed began at the gate. The loose dust on the floor was trampled. And from just outside the gate the tracks of a wagon led away northward.
“Huh!” He grunted his favorite monosyllable.
He walked about the place, noted every mark in the dust, and poked with his toe, here and there, at certain slightly discolored patches in the corral.
“This,” he muttered to himself, “is a highly interestin’ state of affairs, I wish to remark.”
He sat on his horse for a minute after he mounted again. He looked off toward the Marias, in two minds at the moment. Then he reflected that Rock Holloway was on his way to Helena. And for various reasons Charlie concluded to play a lone hand. So he made a complete circle of the place, carefully scanning the ground; when he came back to the wagon track, he followed that, riding at a steady trot.
If he expected that to lead him to any new place, person or conclusion, he was disappointed. In the few years since Charlie first crossed the Marias River, with all the territory north of it an unpeopled waste, the first waves of the ultimate flood of settlers had begun to seep into the country. Up in the Sweet Grass, where he and Rock Holloway had fought a battle with organized thieves, there were now many ranches, small and large. A wagon trail ran between the Sweet Grass and Fort Benton—a trail which crossed the Marias halfway between the TL and the Seventy-seven. The single wagon track Charlie followed angled off until it merged with the Sweet Grass Trail. It was lost in these twin ruts. Wagons came and went daily on that road. One wheel track is as another. For purposes of identification, the trail was lost.
But Charlie kept riding. Far off the construction camps began to show—dim smudges on the horizon. As he drew nearer, he could see the dark streak of the grade and the moving teams. And when the Sweet Grass Trail crossed the right of way, Charlie turned aside and jogged toward a cluster of buildings, like a small village sitting by a stream, where the buffalo lodges of the Blackfeet had been pitched in years gone by.