“Wonder now what thet’s for?” he continued, after standing awhile to consider. “Durn me ef I iver seed sech perplexin’ sign! It ud puzzle ole Dan’l Boone hisself.”
“Which on ’em shed I foller fust? Ef I go arter the two I know whar they’ll lead. They’re boun’ to kim up in thet puddle o’ blood. Let’s track up tother, and see whether he hev rud into the same procksimmuty! To the right abeout, ole gal, and keep clost ahint me—else ye may get lost in the chapparal, an the coyoats may make thur supper on yur tallow. Ho! ho! ho!”
With this apostrophe to his “critter,” ending in a laugh at the conceit of her “tallow,” the hunter turned off on the track of the third horse.
It led him along the edge of an extended tract of chapparal; which, following all three, he had approached at a point well known to him, as to the reader,—where it was parted by the open space already described.
The new trail skirted the timber only for a short distance. Two hundred yards from the embouchure of the avenue, it ran into it; and fifty paces further on Zeb came to a spot where the horse had stood tied to a tree.
Zeb saw that the animal had proceeded no further: for there was another set of tracks showing where it had returned to the prairie—though not by the same path.
The rider had gone beyond. The foot-marks of a man could be seen beyond—in the mud of a half-dry arroyo—beside which the horse had been “hitched.”
Leaving his critter to occupy the “stall” where broken-shoe had for some time fretted himself, the old hunter glided off upon the footmarks of the dismounted rider.
He soon discovered two sets of them—one going—another coming back.
He followed the former.