She turned back to her room, where she quickly donned a pair of overalls, boots, flannel shirt and a wide hat. There was no one to question her coming or going. Her father was on the upper verandah, watching the road to Medicine Tree.
She ran out to the stable, saddled Glory, the little brown mare, and headed due north. At a short distance she looked like a slim young cowboy riding a very swift little horse and going somewhere in a great hurry.
But Cultus didn’t hurry. He was taking plenty of time, because he was still a bit dubious about that note being genuine, and because he was going into an unfamiliar country. The travelling was very uneven, and at places the mesquite forced him to detour widely, but he finally reached the mouth of Padre Canyon, with its steep walls of coloured sandstone. The mouth of the canyon was about two hundred yards wide, with towering spires on either side.
The canyon was quite brushy, but nothing grew on those grim walls, which broke back like the turrets on a queer jumble of castles. Cultus halted at the entrance long enough to smoke a cigarette. The note had asked him to come to the mouth of the canyon, and here he was.
But the only sign of life was a circling buzzard, whose shadow passed and repassed over those broken walls. There was no chance for Cultus to have been mistaken in the canyon. He rode in farther and halted again. From here he could look up at the south wall, where overhanging cliffs threw shadows over what Cultus decided were the old cliff dwellings.
But still there was nothing except the circling buzzard; not even the call of a bird to break the silence. Then he heard a sound behind him. He swung his horse around quickly. It was Jane Kelton on her brown mare, following the tracks of Cultus’s mount.
He waited for her to come up to him, not knowing who she was until she was only a short distance away.
“You haven’t seen him?” she asked quickly. Cultus shook his head, wondering how she knew where he was and what he was looking for.
“You lost that letter and Harry found it,” she explained. “He’s gone to town to get the sheriff and a posse.”
Cultus felt in his pocket for the letter, but it was missing.