Then he cast about with his eyes fixed on the loose gravel over which they had scrambled, until he came to a spot where a wide patch of half-rotted needles lay beneath another belt of pines.
“He stopped here and sat down,” he commented. “Seemed to have had some trouble in pulling out again. I don’t like those footsteps. You and I don’t walk like that.”
“Get on,” said Weston, sharply, and, turning, struck the horse.
The sun was overhead when they scrambled, gasping, over the crest of the divide and looked down into another long, winding hollow. Then they stopped again and looked hard at each other, for the hollow seemed filled with forest, and there was nowhere any shimmer of shining water.
“He can’t be far ahead. Went through those vines in front of you,” said Devine.
Then ensued an hour’s wild scramble through undergrowth in shade, until they broke out, dripping with perspiration, from the gloom among the pines into a comparatively open space on the edge of a wide belt of willows. They left the horse tethered on the outskirts of the latter; and twenty minutes afterward Devine, who had scrambled up and down among the undergrowth, stopped suddenly.
“Come here,” he cried with a suggestive hoarseness. “We’re through with this trail.”
He was standing waist-deep among the tangled brushwood, and it was a minute before Weston smashed through it to his side. Then he, too, stopped and started, for he saw a huddled object in tattered duck lying face downward at his comrade’s feet. The latter made a little gesture when he met Weston’s eyes.
“We’ll make sure,” he said quietly. “Still, you see how he’s lying.”
Weston dropped on his knees, and with some difficulty turned the prostrate figure over. Then he took off his battered hat and looked up at Devine with it in his hand. The latter nodded.