They were already in the saddle and on the road. Dave looked across at his white-faced friend.
"I'm only guessing, Roy, but that's the way I figure it," he said gently.
"You don't think he would try to take her across the desert with him to Mexico."
Ryan shook his head.
"No chance. He couldn't make it. When he leaves the hills, Miss Rutherford will stay there."
"Alive?" asked Beaudry from a dry throat.
"Don't know."
"God!"
"So that whether Miss Beulah did or did not meet Meldrum, we have to look for her up among the mountains of the Big Creek watershed," concluded Dingwell. "I believe we'll find her safe and sound. Chances are Meldrum isn't within forty miles of her."
They were riding toward Lonesome Park, from which they intended to work up into the hills. Just before reaching the rim of the park, they circled around a young pine lying across the trail. Roy remembered the tree. It had stood on a little knoll, strong and graceful, reaching straight toward heaven with a kind of gallant uprightness. Now its trunk was snapped, its boughs crushed, its foliage turning sere. An envious wind had brought it low. Somehow that pine reminded Beaudry poignantly of the girl they were seeking. She, too, had always stood aloof, a fine and vital personality, before the eyes of men sufficient to herself. But as the evergreen had stretched its hundred arms toward light and sunshine, so Beulah Rutherford had cried dumbly to life for some vague good she could not formulate.