“Hooraw!” he triumphantly exclaimed, after a cursory examination of the ground underneath the tree. “I thort so. Thur’s the impreshun o’ the throwed rider. An’ thur’s whar he hez creeped away. Now I’ve got a explication o’ thet big bump as hez been puzzlin’ me. I know’d it wan’t did by the claws o’ any varmint; an it didn’t look like the blow eyther o’ a stone or a stick. Thet ere’s the stick that hez gi’n it.”
With an elastic step—his countenance radiant of triumph—the old hunter strode away from the tree, no longer upon the cattle path, but that taken by the man who had been so violently dismounted.
To one unaccustomed to the chapparal, he might have appeared going without a guide, and upon a path never before pressed by human foot.
A portion of it perhaps had not. But Zeb was conducted by signs which, although obscure to the ordinary eye, were to him intelligible as the painted lettering upon a finger-post. The branch contorted to afford passage for a human form—the displaced tendrils of a creeping plant—the scratched surface of the earth—all told that a man had passed that way. The sign signified more—that the man was disabled—had been crawling—a cripple!
Zeb Stump continued on, till he had traced this cripple to the banks of a running stream.
It was not necessary for him to go further. He had made one more splice of the broken thread. Another, and his clue would be complete!