"A man would almost say old Pop was right," he told himself. "This state is getting too settled up for this kind of game to be pulled off so all-fired regularly. Cole Dalton must be blind in his off eye…. Oh, hell! It is none of my business. Any way … not yet."
He pulled his horse out into the trail paralleling the muddy road, jerked his hat down lower over his forehead, slumped forward a little in the saddle, and gave himself over to the sleepy thirty mile ride to Harte's Camp. He rode slowly now, allowing Hap Smith's speeding horses to draw swiftly away ahead of him. He saw the stage once more climbing a distant ridge; then it was lost to him in the steepening hills. A little more than an hour later he turned off to the left, leaving the county road and entering the mouth of the canyon through which his trail led. He would not see the road again although after a while he would parallel it with some dozen miles of rolling land between him and it.
Behind him lay the wide stretch of plain in which Dry Town was set; about him were the small shut-in valleys where the "little fellows" had their holdings and small herds of long horns and saddle ponies. Before him were the mountains with Kemble's place upon their far slope and his own home range lying still farther to the east. There were many streams to ford in the country through which he was now riding, all muddy-watered, laced with white, frothing edgings, but none to rise higher than his horse's belly.
Here there was a tiny valley, hardly more than a cup in the hills, but valuable for its rich feed and for the big spring set in the middle of it. He dismounted, slipped the Spanish bit from his horse's mouth, and waited for the animal to drink. It was a still, sleepy afternoon. The storm had left no trace in the deep blue of the sky; the hills were rapidly drying under the hot sun. Man and horse seemed sleepy, slow moving figures to fit into a glowing landscape, harmoniously. The horse drank slowly, shook its head in half tolerant protest at the flies singing before its eyes, and played with the water with twitching lips as though, with no will to take up the trail again, it sought to deceive its master into thinking that it was still drinking. The man yawned and his drowsy eyes came away from the wood-topped hills before him to the moist earth under foot. For the moment they did not seem the eyes of the Buck Thornton who had ridden to the bank in Dry Town a little before noon, but were gentle and dreamily meditative with all of the earlier sharp alertness gone. And then suddenly there came into them a quick change, a keen brightness, as he jerked his head forward and stared down at the ground at his feet.
"Now what is she doing out this way?" he asked himself aloud. "And where is she going?"
Though the soil was cut and beaten with the sharp hoofs of the many cattle that had drunk here earlier in the day, it was not so rough that it hid the thing which the quick eyes of the cattle man found and understood. There, close to the water's edge and almost under his own horse's body, were the tracks a shod horse had left not very long ago. The spring water was still trickling into one of them. There, too, a little to the side was the imprint of the foot of the rider who had gotten down to drink from the same stream, the mark of a tiny, high heeled boot.
"It might be some other girl," he told himself by way of answer to his own question. "And it might be a Mex with a proud, blue-blooded foot. But," and he leaned further forward studying the foot print, "it's a mighty good bet I could tell what she looks like from the shape of her head to the colour of her eyes! Now, what do you suppose she's tackling? Something that Mr. Templeton says is plumb foolish and full of danger?"
He slipped the bit back into his horse's mouth and swung up into the saddle.
"She didn't come out the way I came," he reflected as for a moment he sat still, looking down at the medley of tracks. "I'd have seen her horse's tracks. She must have made a big curve somewhere. I wonder what for?"
Then slowly the gravity left his eyes and a slow smile came into them.
He surprised his horse with a touch of the spurs.