“Shore, fellers, we’s way off the trail in this-yere!” spoke up Big John, suddenly. “Ef Sid’s come through here, he’d be ridin’ the pinto. What we wants is somethin’ off thet hoss!—I’ve got the idee!” he exclaimed, his eyes brightening. “He rode off an’ forgot his hobbles,—like a kid will, allers forgettin’ somethin’. I’ve got ’em in the horse gear pack, right now.”
He loosened the diamond hitch on one of the pack ponies, while the others were rounding up Ruler and the pups. Presently he yanked a pair of leather hobbles out from under the tarp.
“Here, Ruler,—you ol’ pisen critter,—smell ’em!” he commanded, shoving the hobbles into Ruler’s eager nose. “They’re sure whiffy of hoss-flesh! Go fetch, Ruler! Fetch! Ssssuey, dawg!”
Ruler rose on his hind legs and pawed the air with an understanding bellow. It did not take much further encouragement to get him to circling about, snuffing along the canyon trail with busy nose. The party sat watching him on horseback, half skeptical over the experiment, the Colonel inclined to ride down the Canyon to the west, first, for that was the direction from which Sid would have to come. But Ruler was famed for his sagacity. Many a story had drifted back from Arkansas of the incredible feats he had performed,—such as finding lost children in the mountains, and once of having gone back three miles into the forest to retrieve an axe forgotten in the woods.
A bellow from him decided it. Ruler braced back on his haunches, pointed his great black muzzle to the skies, and let out a rolling barking-treed call that was his signal of having found a trail. Then he set off hotfoot to the east, his three pups yipping after him excitedly. The men spurred their ponies to a gallop, for Ruler took a hot pace to keep up with him.
He talked excitedly in hound language as he loped along. “It’s all right!—Here’s more!—I’ve got him coming fine!” his reassuring tones seemed to say, as he ate up the narrow horse trail ahead of him. The walls of the canyon seemed to fly by as the ponies strung out in pursuit. There was no time to so much as glance up at ruins, now. They had lost interest in ruins, somehow! Here was Sid’s trail, leading out of the canyon; though why or when he had gone they could not conjecture.
Gradually the trail sloped upward, and the surrounding walls became less high and further apart. At the top of the last gulch a vast sterile plain spread before them. Low junipers and mesquite dotted it,—semidesert again! Big John turned in his saddle to shout back at them.
“Watch out for Navaho hogans, fellers!” he yelled. “There’s quite a lot of them settled hereabouts.”
Scotty looked around from his jouncing pony, but could spy out absolutely nothing. He knew that the hogans, or Navaho houses, appeared from the outside as mere dirt mounds, and were usually built near mesas or rocky ridges where it would take a sharp eye to pick them out. They were never built near water, the Navahos preferring to carry it from some distant source. It was all a part of their stealthy raiding and marauding tendencies; a war-like folk that had invaded the pueblo country several centuries ago,—whose very villages were a sort of ambush for the unwary.
But Ruler still kept on, streaking across the desert in an unhesitating run. His occasional bay showed that the pony’s trail was quite recent, enough so that the heat of the desert day had not evaporated all scent from it. Then far to the east showed up a broken ridge of rock with quite a thicket around it, rising like a green hummock out of the ocean of gray sage. In the midst of it Scotty’s young eyes made out a tiny patch of color.