With Hoops of Steel

by Florence Finch Kelly

“It was here,” said Marguerite. “I am very sure of the place. He stood beside me and while I was thinking about—something that troubled me, and reading a letter, he slipped away. I was sure he had only run down the hill into the arroyo, but when I looked for him, and it seemed hardly more than a minute, I could not find him.”

Mead looked about for footprints, but the ground had been trampled by scores of feet since the night before, and tracks of shoes in many sizes covered the sandy earth. A few scattered searchers were near them, but the great mass of people could be seen in groups and bunches trailing off over the hills, most of them headed to the northeast. A shout came along the line and one of the men near by ran across the hills to learn its cause.

“What had he been talking about?” Mead asked.

“About Heaven and our mother, and if he could see her if he should go there.”

Mead looked about him, thinking there was no clue in that, when his glance rested upon the towering peaks of the Hermosa range, their western slopes soft in the violet shadows of the forenoon, their upreared crags seeming to lean against the very blue of the sky. A sudden memory from his own childish years flashed into his mind.

“I remember when I was a kid I used to think that if I could only get to the top of a mountain I could jump from it into the sky and see God. Children always think Heaven is in the sky, don’t they? Maybe he had some such idea. Let’s go straight toward the mountain and see if we can’t find his tracks.”

They walked down the hill, and in the sand in the bottom of the arroyo Mead’s quick eye caught a faint depression. He stopped Marguerite as she was about to step on it, and they knelt together to examine it. There were other footprints all about, but this one little track had escaped obliteration, and none had noticed it. Marguerite thought it was the size and shape of his shoe, and they went on over the hill, watching the ground closely, but seeing nothing more. A man came running back to tell them that a child’s footprints had been found near the mountain road, two miles or more to the northward. Marguerite wished to go there at once.

“Yes, certainly, go if you wish,” said Mead, “but I think I will stay here. If they have found his tracks there are plenty of people there to follow them, but I am anxious to follow this lead.”

Marguerite said she would stay with him, and the others hurried over the mesa to the mountain road, leaving the two alone. They walked slowly up and down the hills toward the mountains, finding in one place a little curved depression, as if from the toe of the child’s shoe. And presently, close behind a clump of bushes, they saw two little shoe-prints clearly defined in the sand. They were so close to the bush that they had escaped detection.

“Why, he must have hid here while I was looking for him!” Marguerite exclaimed, “for I came to the top of the hill, not more than twenty feet away! He must have hid behind this big bush and kept very still when he heard me calling, and that was how he got away from me!”