“Now you are talking. I’ll get in touch with the firm and see what my boss thinks. Much obliged, Buddy, for the tip, and much obliged too for the desire to give me a good time.” He held out his hand and Caldwell gripped it firmly in his own.
“Now that’s settled,” Jim put in—“the sheriff said that Summers has an instrument here and he has tapped the telephone wires. Your idea of getting in touch with Dad and the Don is great, I’ll do it by phone.”
“Oh—yes, sure you can do that.” Bob’s face fell and he sighed as he saw how quickly his perfectly good plan to get Austin away from the danger zone vanished into thin air. “Sure, you can do that and it will save time, too.”
“Hello there!” Carl Summers, who was a stocky little Texan, came swinging carelessly up the winding trail, his face wreathed in smiles.
“Hello yourself. We were at Crofton and the sheriff asked us to drop in and see how things are,” Jim explained.
“That’s fine. For a couple of days I sure have been doing some tall figuring without getting an answer. Guess I was sort of hipped with the snow and the emptiness of this place, but I wasn’t all goofy,” he said.
“Did you find anything?” Jim asked. He and Kramer were out of the cock-pit ready to listen to the story, whatever it was.
“Yes, a spell ago. I’ve been feeling that I wasn’t alone on this ranch and it got me worried, not because I was afraid, but because I couldn’t come up with anyone. The first time was at night, I was asleep in a bunk I fixed myself in the old root house, that dugout, and I awoke thinking I heard prowlers. I couldn’t find anything, but dozens of times since then I was sure I was being trailed; then I found those bear tracks and I know bears are enjoying a siesta this time of year, but they were tracks and they went around in a circle. It didn’t make me feel too good trying to figure what made ’em.”
“It must have made you anxious,” Kramer remarked.
“Surely did, brother. I reported to the sheriff and he promised to get someone here as fast as he could, and he told me to keep watch. Now, you two know bear tracks, just for fun come and look at this set and see if you can tell what made them and where the animal came from or went,” he proposed.