“Somebody’s been here,” he said. “Here are the ashes of a fire.”
Larry joined him quickly and stooped to lay his hand on the ashes.
“They’re cold,” he announced. “But somebody has had a fire here within a few hours. If it was Dick, why didn’t he stay here? And if it was somebody else——” The sentence was broken because he was down on his hands and knees looking for tracks in the short-grass turf. It didn’t take him long, poor as the fading light was, to find tiny hoofprints in the soft soil. “It was Dick’s fire,” he said definitely. “He has been here, and he built the fire—and when he went away he didn’t put it out.”
“Well,” queried Purdick, “what does that mean?”
“It means just one of two things, Purdy: either Dick had some reason for leaving in a hurry, or else he was made to leave.”
“How do you know?”
“It’s as plain as the nose on your face. That fire went out of itself—burned out; you can see that by the ashes. And Dick is too good a woodsman to go off and leave his camp-fire burning unless he had a mighty good reason for it.”
Purdick was feeling in the haversack, which contained only the mineralogy book and two biscuit sandwiches. What he said showed that he was still too much of a townsman to suspect that anything serious had happened to Dick Maxwell.
“Gee!” he exclaimed. “I wish I hadn’t eaten so much over yonder in the canyon. Dick has vanished with the grub, and it’s getting dark, and we’ve got just two sandwiches to chew on. I call that pathetic.”
“Wake up!” said Larry sharply. “We’ve got to find Dick, and do it now—not because we haven’t enough grub for supper, but because it looks as if Dick is in trouble of some sort! Get down here and help me to find out which way these burro tracks are pointing. Get busy, quick, before the light is entirely gone!”