“It was a match all right, but I’ll bet he did not drop it,” Baxter commented. “Let’s go see what we can find.”
The emergency over, the lookout’s wife had gone quietly back to her home work. The three men went down into the valley to investigate. They easily picked up the man’s trail and found where it touched the edge of the burn. Sure enough, there was plenty of evidence to show that the match was not dropped carelessly. Pine needles had been carefully raked together in a long pile which had apparently been lighted in several places. No efforts had been made to efface the traces of the work.
“Just what I thought,” Baxter exclaimed, straightening up with a frown.
“But why in thunder did he set the thing right under my nose?” asked Benny in an injured tone.
“Probably like the rest of us,” Baxter laughed, “he wanted to see you work. No, that was just sheer bravado. That fire was set as a warning to show us what would happen if we pushed this sheep business and he wanted to put it where it would surely be seen.”
“By the way,” Benny asked with sudden interest, “how did the recount come out? I called up Dawson, but he was not home.”
When he had heard the story he shook his head sagely. “If that is the way it stands I would not be surprised if that was what the fire was for. And I would not be surprised if there were some more of them in the next few days.”
With this comforting piece of news Scott started back by the way of the bench to have a look at the sheep before he went home to supper. He found them all trailing back to the feeding grounds. The herders were in a sullen mood. Not that it made much difference to them who owned the sheep, but they felt the failure of the plan as a personal defeat and they took it out in hating the man who had frustrated the plan. They hinted darkly at what would happen to the district and its patrolman.
Their attitude furnished Scott with some food for thought. If these men who had no financial interests at stake felt as bitter as they did, he could well imagine the feelings of Dawson, Jed and Dugan. Two of them he knew to be unscrupulous and Baxter had assured him that Dawson would be no better. He was beginning to think a little more seriously of Baxter’s advice. It would be hard for one man to live alone and protect himself against three others for an indefinite time.
He had ridden so slowly that it was dusk when he turned Jed into the corral and went to the lonely cabin to prepare his supper. There was no evidence that any one had been there in his absence, but he felt uneasy. These men were not like the men he had known. If they would come out in the open and fight fairly with their fists he would not have thought twice about it, but the thought of being shot in the back with no chance at all seemed horrible. It was one thing to rush a man in the face of a loaded gun in the flush of excitement, and to feel hour after hour that the same gun may be aimed at you from behind a tree or from out of the darkness around the cabin. It was the unfairness of it all that oppressed him; the feeling that it was something over which he had no control.