"But where did he go?" asked Nort, following the marks left by a horse that had, obviously, been hard pressed. "See, the sign goes right up to this rocky wall, and then stops. He couldn't have gotten up there, could he?"
"Not unless he wore wings," said Bud grimly. "But it's getting too dark to see well. We'd better be getting back to camp."
"I thought you were going to follow this up, and see what had happened to your pipe line," suggested Dick.
"I am, but we can't ride on without some grub. No telling what we may stack up against. We'll have to make a night ride of it, I'm thinking, and I'd like to have Buck Tooth along. He's a shark on following a blind trail. Come on, we'll go back to camp, get some grub and then take this up again. I hope I didn't kill him, though," murmured Bud, as he again leaped to the saddle, an example followed by Nort and Dick.
"Who was he?" asked the latter, puffing slightly from his exertions, for he was much stouter than his brother Nort.
"Search me!" replied Bud. "Looked mighty suspicious, though, the way he rode off. And if he wasn't up to something wrong he'd 'a' stopped when I hailed him."
"Do you think he had anything to do with the break in the pipe?" asked Nort.
"You've got me again," confessed his western cousin. "We'll have to make a night ride of it and find out."
They rode back to the camp tents, to find Buck Tooth calmly smoking his red-stone Indian pipe, and gazing off in the darkening distance at nothing at all, as far as the boys could determine.
"Anybody been around, Buck?" asked Bud.