“Get the critter! Drill him! Don’t let him get away,” yelled the rancher. “You women stay here till we find out what’s doing. There may be some shooting, and there surely will be if I ketch sight of the coyote who did that.”
Jim-Sam had strolled out behind the others, the least excited of the party. They reasoned that the person who fired the shot into the room, evidently with the intention of hitting Sam Conifer, would not be found outside waiting to be caught. It was a pot shot and it had missed, but the shooter, by this time, no doubt was well on his way to safety.
Jim began snooping about, but the night was too dark to enable him to find what he was looking for, and the girls, not to be denied, stepped out.
“Here! Take my pocket lamp,” said Grace, thrusting it into his hand.
“Thankee, Miss,” growled Jim, and began sweeping the rays from the lamp over the ground in front of the bunk-house door. “Here’s whar the critter stood when he let go,” announced Jim. “Anybody recognize them boot-prints?”
No one did, and Jim went on nosing out the trail, which he followed for several rods down the valley, though the footprints were mixed with the tracks of cowpunchers and ponies. Jim continued his tracking until he reached a point where the shooter had met and mounted a pony, on which he dashed away straight for the hills. Those hoof-prints were of keen interest to Jim-Sam. They were the prints of unshod hoofs, and the two men looked at each other with a meaning gaze.
“I reckon the feller was shootin’ with his left hand, an’ that’s why he missed,” observed Sam.
“I reckon,” agreed Jim.
“What have you got, Conifer?” called Joe Bindloss, dashing up on his pony.
The men explained what they had found, and the old rancher raged and stormed, declaring that he would get the fellow, that he would set his cowpunchers on the trail at once to follow it until they did get the man.