“You won’t do it for nothing. It will be a good thing for you. You won’t have as many to bother with when you get back.”
He left the man cursing and screaming, and rode on. There was intense satisfaction in showing these fellows that he was on to them.
The chase after the second band had brought him so far down toward the valley cliffs that he decided to have a look at the little cañons where the extra sheep had come in before he notified the other herders of the recount. He was still gloating over his little interview with the first herder when he came to the cliffs. He had never seen the cañons but he knew their location from his map and had soon found the one farthest east. He rode clear around the rim of it. There was not a single hoof print. The upper portion of it was rather broad and shallow, but when he went down into it he soon found that it ended in an almost perpendicular drop to the valley below.
“Not much chance there,” Scott thought as he mounted Jed and started in search of the next cañon. The second cañon was very much like the first. It was a little larger at the top but ended in the same precipitous drop.
Before he reached the third cañon a new idea occurred to him. Perhaps it would be just as well not to leave any tracks around these cañons. He did not know just why but he had a hunch that he did not want the herders to know that he had been to those other cañons.
He began to suspect that the report was a joke to make him investigate all those impossible cañons.
“I’ve got to look at every one of them now,” Scott fumed, “just to make sure that it was not a fake, but I’ll see that nobody knows that I have done it.” He rode doggedly on to the next cañon, but he dismounted at some distance from it and took care to cover up his tracks wherever he went. And so he inspected every one of those little cañons along that five miles of valley cliffs, and everywhere he found the same thing. Not a sign of a sheep trail anywhere and the same steep drop at the bottom.
“Self-respecting squirrel would not try to climb any of them,” Scott muttered disgustedly as he finished the inspection. “Well, they worked their joke all right but they’ll never have the satisfaction of knowing it,” and he carefully covered up the last sign of his visit.
“Now to notify those other greasers,” Scott exulted as he rode back toward the grazing grounds.
All of a sudden he straightened up with a jerk. He had found out that the entrance of the sheep through the valley cañons was a fake, but if they did not come in there, where under the sun did they come from? He had forgotten all about that in his anxiety to get away from those cañons. There was only one way to find it out now and that was to ride around the boundary of his whole district.