Yet, when he threw it open, there was nothing to be seen!
The silence and the darkness of the night were overwhelming—as only the silence and darkness of the plains of Arizona can be.
Sam Bowser was the owner of the Double Cross ranch. With no neighbors nearer than thirty miles, he and his wife, Sarah, lived in the home ranch house. This building faced the South. To the right, and some sixty feet distant, was the bunkhouse, where the cowpunchers lived when not on the range. To the North and between the two houses was a horse corral. Directly back of this was a second corral for the cattle, so large that it seemed more like a big pasture enclosed by barbed wire than a yard.
Only the day before had Bowser’s men driven the pick of his herds back to the home ranch in order that they might be shipped away to the great cattle markets of the Middle West.
Scarcely had the ranch owner opened the door than lights blazed in the bunkhouse, followed an instant later by the rush of the cowpunchers, as, guns in their hands, they crept cautiously from their shanty to learn the cause of the alarm.
“Steady, boys! Don’t go to shooting up the country!” warned Bowser, running across the yard to join his men.
“What did you make of it, Sam?” demanded a tall, leathery cowpuncher, who served as foreman.
“You’ve got me, Sandy. The missus ’lows it’s some woman being murdered.”
“But there ain’t any women round here,” protested another of the men, who had been christened “Pinky” by his fellows because of his fondness for decorating his saddle and bridle with anything of the color.
“That’s just what I told her,” declared the ranchman, evidently glad to learn his opinion found support. “But she ’lowed that didn’t make any difference, that one or a dozen could be brought here. I sort of had an idea, it might have been a coyote.”