But Chuck knew the location of the hidden shack, and led them straight to it. There was no clearing to show that any kind of a habitation existed. The front end of the dwelling had been built of jackpine poles, more like the entrance to a tunnel than a human abode.
The old door was still in place, but sagging open. Just at the entrance, where they dismounted, was a space of possibly twenty feet long of fairly bare ground. There were horsetracks here, and Hashknife squatted on his heels to study them closely, while Sleepy and Chuck kept an eye on the sagging door.
“C’mere, Sleepy,” said Hashknife. He pointed a forefinger at a track in the dusty earth. In fact there were two tracks close together, apparently made by the same animal, but one track showed a smooth shoe, while the other mark plainly showed a calked shoe.
“The Ghost!” snorted Sleepy. “Yessir, that’s him.”
“Yore gray horse?” queried Chuck.
“Yeah,” nodded Hashknife.
“Yuh mean to tell me yuh know the footprints of yore own horse, Hashknife?”
“I ought to—I shoe him myself, Chuck. Notice that track? That’s his left front foot. Put a toe-calk on that foot and he’ll stumble badly; so I always shoe him with light calks on the rest, and leave that one plain. But the worst of it is, we don’t know how long ago these tracks were made. A track would look fresh a long time in that dry earth.”
Practically all of the cabin was a dugout, and, except for the entrance, was of dirt walls. The floor was of dirt. At the rear was a small fireplace, and the rusty old stovepipe barely cleared the top of the brush on the slope of the hill.
There had not been a fire in the dugout for a long time, and the only sign of occupancy was an empty bean can, still containing a few fairly fresh beans, and on the dirt floor were a number of cigarette-butts. Hashknife examined them and decided that some of them had been smoked but a short time ago.