“My pardner—you’ve murdered my pardner!” he shouted. “And I’m going to find you out! I’m going to kill you!”
Then he suddenly calmed as he realized that he was alone in the mountains, a week’s travel from the nearest mining-camp, alone with his dead partner. He moved back from the ledge and into the shadow, where he sat down upon a broken boulder. All at once a thing which he had forgotten swept back over him—the horses! He had missed the noise of their crunching, he had failed to hear the jingle of old Shaggy’s tie-chain!
He sprang to his feet and ran down into the little clearing where they had tied the two pack-animals. They were gone, both gone. He stumbled over one of the pack-saddles with its load. There had been no time to take that. But the other, old Shaggy’s saddle, was missing.
Slowly he made his way back to the little ledge where Johnny Watson lay. Again he sat down upon the bit of boulder, and lighting his pipe pulled at it steadily, staring down into the quiet cañon. He could not follow tracks until morning.
With the first glint of the new day he buried Johnny Watson.
For a moment Dick stood hat in hand, looking at the little mound of earth which he had made and piled high with stones. And then he turned and, walking swiftly, strode back to the spot where the horses had been staked.
There was no difficulty in picking up the trail. Upon that rugged, rocky mountainside the murderer, if he had taken the two horses with him, must have moved eastward and into the Devil’s Pocket, or in a direction leading southwesterly over the trail which Farley and Watson had come yesterday. He could not have scaled the cliffs above, he could have made no progress through the dense brush of the deep-cut ravine below.
For a moment Farley hesitated between going forward toward the little mountain valley and turning back. Then the thought came to him that he could hope to learn what he sought to know by going forward, quicker than by swinging back toward the southwest. For if the two horses had gone eastward, it would be easier to pick up their trail than upon the path which they had cut up yesterday. If there should be any fresh tracks leading into the Devil’s Pocket, that would settle it. And not ten minutes later, having followed the stony trail until it dipped a little into a bit of soft soil in a hollow, he found the tracks—fresh tracks made by two shod horses.
Then he went back to last night’s camp, made himself a small pack of bacon and coffee and flour; and taking no useless thing, no blanket even to interfere with the free swing of his body, he turned east and struck out swiftly.