CHAPTER VI
A MOONLIGHT RECONNAISSANCE
The evening following his visit to the CL, Johnny went to bed early but not to sleep. For several hours he lay thinking and listening, and then he arose and put on his moccasins, threw on his shoulder Logan's rope, now knotted every foot of its length, slipped out of the cabin and was swallowed up in the darkness along the base of the rocky wall. To cover the few yards between the cabin and the narrow crevice took ten minutes, and to go softly up the crevice took twice as long.
Reaching the top he listened intently, and then moved slowly and silently to a small clump of pines growing close to the rim of the steep wall enclosing the walled-in pasture, at a point where it was so sheer and smooth that he believed it would not be watched. Fastening one end of the rope to a tree, he lowered the rest of it over the wall and went down. Pausing again to listen, he made his way to a line of stones which lay across the creek, crossed with dry feet, and reached the northern wall of the pasture. This could be climbed at half a dozen places and he soon was up it and on his way north. After colliding with several bowlders and tripping twice he waited until the moon arose and then went on again at a creditable speed.
The crescent moon had risen well above the tops of Twin Buttes when a man in moccasins moved cautiously across a high plateau some miles north of Nelson's creek and finally dropped to all fours and proceeded much more slowly. From all fours to stomach was his next choice and he wriggled toward the edge of the plateau, pausing every foot or so to remove loose stones. These he put aside before going on again, for there is no telling where a rolling pebble will stop, or the noise it may make, when the edge of a mesa wall is but a few feet away. Coming to within an arm's length of the edge, he first made sure that the rim was solid rock and free from dirt and pebbles; and then, hitching forward slowly, he peered down into the deep valley.
Its immensity amazed him, for upon the occasion of his former reconnaissance he had viewed it from the outside; and as a picture of his own pasture flashed into his mind he snorted softly at the contrast, for where he had acres, this great "sink" had square miles. It was wider than his own was long, and it stretched away in the faint moonlight until its upper reaches were lost to his eyes. It was large enough to hold one great butte in its middle, and perhaps there were more; and from where he lay he judged the wall below him dropped straight down for three hundred feet.
"There ain't no line ridin' here, unless th' cows grow wings," he muttered.
To the south of him were four lighted windows near the forbidding blackness of the entrance canyon, and from their spacing he deduced two houses. And across from the windows he could make out a vague quadrangle, which experience told him was the horse corral. As if to confirm his judgment there came from it at that moment a shrill squeal and the sound of hoofs on wood, muffled by the distance. And from the corral extended a faint line which ran across the valley and became lost in the darkness near the opposite cliff. This he knew to be a fence.
"If this valley ends like it begins, three or four men can handle an awful lot of cows, 'cept at drive time," he soliloquized, and then listened intently to the sound of distant voices.
... many happy hours away,