Hank outside the tent had seized his foot and seemed trying to pull his leg off.
“Come out!” cried Hank. “She’s gone!”
“Gone! Who’s gone?”
“Tommie. They’ve stolen her.”
Candon, already awakened and out, was running around looking at the sand as if hunting her foot steps.
The raving Hank explained that, unable to sleep, he had come out and found the Mexicans gone. Some premonition of evil had made him glance at Tommie’s tent opening. Not being able to see her, he looked closer. She was gone. They had stolen her.
“After them!” cried George.
Aroused from a fantastic dream he found himself faced with something almost equally fantastic. The size of Tommie made a lot of things possible. Visions of her, captured and strangled and stuffed into one of the bags on the mule’s back, rose before him, though why or for what purpose the greasers should commit such an act was not clear.
The going was hard over the sand till they reached the defile in the cliffs towards which the mule tracks seemed to lead. Here the way led gently uphill over broken rocky ground till they reached a low plateau where, under the unchanging sunlight, the landscape lay spread in humps and hollows to the hills away to the east. Rock, sagebrush and sand, cactus, sand, sagebrush, it lay before them; but of Tommie, the mule or her captors, there was no trace or sign. The sand here was no use for tracking purposes, it was beach sand blown up by west winds and lay only in places, rock was the true floor, rock rising sometimes six feet in camel humps obstructing the view.