He thrust the running iron deeper into the glowing coals.
CHAPTER XIV
THE WITNESS
The morning was hardly two hours old, and the crisp air was stinging sweet with the tang of pine and fir, as Rathburn rode jauntily down the trail on the eastern slope of the divide and drew rein on the crest of a high ridge. As he looked below he whistled softly.
“Juniper, hoss, there’s folks down there plying a nefarious trade, a plumb dangerous trade,” he mused, digging for the tobacco and brown papers in the pocket of his shirt. “I reckon they’re carrying on in direct defiance of the law, hoss.”
The dun-colored mustang tossed his head impatiently, but his master ignored the animal’s fretful desire to be off and dallied with tobacco and paper, fashioning a cigarette, lighting it, breathing thin smoke as his gray eyes squinted appraisingly at the scene below.
Winding down into the foothills, in striking contrast to the dim trails higher up, was a well-used road. It evidently led from the saffron-tinted dump and gray buildings of a mine which showed on the side of a big, bald mountain to southward. At a point almost directly below the ridge where the man and horse stood, it crossed a small hogback and descended a steep slope between lines of jack pines, disappearing in the timber farther down.
The gaze of the man on the ridge was concentrated on the bit of road which showed on the hogback and the slope beyond. A truck was laboriously climbing the ascent. But the watcher evidently was not so 99 much concerned with the approach of the truck as with certain movements which were in progress on the hogback at the head of the grade.