With Hoops of Steel

by Florence Finch Kelly

They went on over the hills, Mead keeping a fairly straight course toward the mountains, and constantly running his eye along the ground in front of them. Twice he saw faint depressions in the sand, partly obliterated, but enough to make him think they were on the right track. At last, in a wide, sandy arroyo, he paused before a track in the farther edge of the sand which turned up the canyon.

“What time was it when you lost him?” he asked.

“Just at sunset. I remember, because the red was on the mountains and the sky was very brilliant.”

“Then by the time he had traveled this far it was dark and this wide sandy streak was lighter and brighter than the hill up there, covered with bushes. Come on!”

Mead rushed up the canyon, almost on the run, his eye catching a toe-print here, a heel track there, a sunken pebble in one spot, a crushed blade of grass beside the sand in another. The young men who had gone out first had been through this arroyo the night before, when the moonlight did not show the faint trail. Since sunrise the searching parties had gone farther toward the north, covering ground which the other party had left untouched, for every one believed, since the failure of the first expedition, that the child must have turned in that direction and tried to go home.

Mead and Marguerite followed the winding of the arroyo for a mile or more, and at last, where it headed and the ground was covered by a thicker growth of bushes, the little tracks climbed the hill. By that time they were well beyond the farthest point toward the mountains which any one else believed the child could have reached, and there were no footprints of previous searchers to perplex their eyes or blot out such traces as they might find. From the top of the hill they saw the great body of men again scattering out over the mesa, and knew that they had been disappointed.

It was some minutes before Mead found any indication of the trail on the hill. Then the child seemed to have wandered about in the dark without purpose. For a long time he had kept to the top of the hill, going backward and forward and circling about, and at last following its crest toward the mountains.

“This must have been after the moon rose,” Mead said, “and while it was still so low that only the top of the hill was light.”

After a time the track turned down the hillside again, and the man and the girl followed, eagerly scanning the ground for the faint traces of the child’s feet. Slowly and carefully they walked along, sometimes able to follow the trail without difficulty for long distances, and again keeping it only by the greatest care. Marguerite noticed that Mead looked for it always toward the south, and asked him why he did it.