He began to search the ground closely.
“What ye found?” called Pizen Jane, who was watching him.
“A letter from an old friend.”
“Funny kind of a post office to be gittin’ letters out of!” she observed. “What’s it like?—a love letter?”
The scout ignored her question and went on with his search.
He found wolf tracks out beyond the point where the ground had been torn by the hoofs of horses, thus establishing his belief that the man who had camped alone there during the night had been troubled by the wolves, and had fired upon them.
“I wonder if that man could have been Nomad?” was his thought. He dismissed it in a moment. “No; Nomad is too wary to have gone on without inspecting my camp by the river; and, if he had inspected it, he would have discovered me and made himself known.”
He searched again at the point where the letter had been trampled into the soil. This examination convinced him that the horse that had stepped on the letter had been of the horses that were there two nights before.
“Whoever the man was who did the shooting he was not Nomad.”
After a while he returned to where the woman had stood watching him.