“We’re coming to it; this is the gulch.”
A few minutes later the two-car train slowed down and came to a stand on a sharp curve at the head of a densely wooded ravine in the foot-hills. Harding ran forward to get his posse out, and by the time Maxwell and Sprague had debarked the ground at the track-side was black with men. Sprague laughed softly.
“It’s lucky we’re not depending upon the old Indian method of ‘reading the sign,’” he said. “Whatever the ground might have told us is a story spoiled by this time.” Then he laughed again when a man broke out of the crowd, with a couple of dogs towing him furiously at the end of their leashes. “We gabble a good bit about our civilization and the advances we’ve made,” he went on. “Yet, in the relatively simple matter of running down a criminal, we haven’t got very far beyond the methods of the Stone Age. The idea of an intelligent being, with a human brain to rely upon, falling back upon the instincts of a couple of brute beasts!”
“Oh, hold on,” Maxwell protested. “Those dogs have run down a good many crooks, first and last. Follansbee will take any bet you want to make, right now.”
“And he would lose,” was the confident answer. “But come on; let’s see what’s going to happen.”
The chase, with the dogs running upon a comparatively fresh scent, led up through the pine wood at the head of the gulch. Beyond the wood was a bare, high-lying mesa table-land, with its summer-baked soil dried out to almost rocky hardness. A hundred yards from the gulch head an indistinct road skirted the mesa edge, and here the dogs began to run in circles.
Sprague was chuckling again, but Maxwell counselled patience.
“Wait a minute,” he suggested. “The body-snatchers probably had a team here. The dogs will get the scent of the horses presently.”
“Think so?” queried the expert. Then he drew his companion aside. “Do you know anything about this road, Dick?”
“Yes, it’s the old wagon road from the Reservation into the park.”