"It's a cinch," he ruminated, "that Sam Wing wouldn't go near the trail, but would do his level best to get as far away from it as he could. That means, if I'm any guesser, that he climbed the hill and tried to lose himself beyond. Me for the other side," and the cowboy began pawing and scrambling up the steep slope.
Ten minutes of hard work brought him to the crest, and here again he halted to peer anxiously around and to listen. He could neither hear nor see anything that gave him a line on Matt and the Chinaman.
"Whoop-ya!" he yelled at the top of his lungs. "Matt! Where are you, pard?"
A jaybird mocked him from somewhere in the timber, and a frightened hawk took wing and soared skyward.
"Blamed if this ain't real excitin'!" growled the cowboy. "I'm going to do something to help lay that yellow tinhorn by the heels, though, and you can paste that in your hat. If Matt came over the hill, then it stands to reason he went down on this other side. I'll keep on, by guess and by gosh, and maybe something will happen."
McGlory kept on for half an hour, floundering through the bushes, making splendid time in his slide to the foot of the hill, and from there striking out on an erratic course that carried him toward all points of the compass. He climbed rocky hills and descended them, he followed ravines, and he sprinted across narrow levels, yelling for Matt from time to time, but receiving no answer. Then he discovered that something had happened—and that he was lost.
Trying to locate himself by the position of the sun, he endeavored to return to the road. Instead of calling for Matt, he now began whooping it up for Martin. The sun appeared to be in the wrong place, and the road and the spring had vanished. The farther McGlory went, the more confused and bewildered he became. At last he dropped down on a bowlder and panted out his chagrin and disgust.
"Lost! Me, Joseph Easy Mark McGlory, Arizona puncher and boss trailer of the deserts and the foothills! Lost, plumb tangled up in my bearings, clean gone off the jump—and in this two-by-twice range of toy mountains where Rip Van Winkle snoozed for twenty years. I wonder if Rip was as tired as I am when he laid down to snatch his forty winks. Sufferin' tenderfoot! I've walked far enough to carry me plumb to Albany, if it had all been in a straight line. Matt!" and again he lifted his voice. "Martin!"
The lusty yell echoed and reverberated through the surrounding woods, but brought no answer.
Then, suddenly, the cowboy was seized from behind by a pair of stout arms, pulled backward off the bowlder, and flattened out on the ground by a heavy knee on his chest.