Argosy, Vol. 117, No. 3 — page 76: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

B86 And he felt now, in the same way, that he had only to remain there quiet and at length the girl would circle back to the place. Yet this might mean a delay of days and days and in the meantime the hounds of the law would be on his track. Moreover, the one thing in the world which he could least en- dure was inaction. It was on this account that he chose the least promising way of reaching her. He skirted about among the rocks until he found the trail of her horse as she had rid- den from the camp. Small, short steps they were at first, and the traces of the girl’s boots went alongside. Apparently she had led the horse for a short distance from the place where Dix slept by the fire, and she had checked back the stallion so that his steps would fall lightly on the rock. In a little way, how- ever, the double track ceased. The four prints of a standing horse were plain and deep in a piece of Sand. Here she had mounted. Then the steps of the horse grew wider apart and more distinct. She had gone on from here at a trot. The direction was straight across the ra- vine, at right-angles to the course she had told him to pursue up the valley, across the mountains, and then following the river to the north. Dix Van Dyck growled to himself. Certainly she had intended to leave him in the lurch. He fastened his eyes on the rocky side of the ravine and trotted his horse up the steep slope. The signs were not hard to follow. The iron shoes of the stallion, striking the rock, chopped off little fragments which blazed away as plain to the practised eye of Dix Van Dyck as if the course had been marked in ink across white paper. He came now, however, upon a harder strata of rock where a glass would be neces- sary to follow the imprints even of iron shoes. But at this point the trail wound sharply to the right as if the rider had swerved from the hard rocks by preference and chosen a course along the gravel at the side. This swerving trail puzzled Dix Van Dyck deeply. For it was most unusual for a rider of the desert to change a course be- cause of so slight an obstacle. Particularly when riding a shod horse. THE ARGOSY. However, he did not waste time in won- der. He was too interested in the fresh trail. By the way the sand had drifted in upon the tracks, blurring them under the drive of the brisk wind, she could not have passed that way more than three hours be- fore. His heart looked up with hope. In this manner he came to the crest of the ridge along the left side of the canon—a sharp crest dipping down on the further side almost as abruptly as it rose from the first valley. Just past the summit the trail veered sharply to the left and stopped in a maze of signs. It was a great: slab of red- dish stone, of copper coloring, but even that hard surface had taken a numerous imprint. In a hundred places the stone was marked, and as he read the sign, the horse had sev-. eral times turned round and round here, as if chafing under a restraint which held him here for an appreciable interval. Examining the ground at the edges of the rock, he caught the imprint of the girl’s boot. She had dismounted here, then. And the track was very fresh—not more than an hour old, as far as he could judge, though even the most experienced, he knew, often go astray in such matters. Why she should stop here when she was barely started on her way he could not by any means imagine. A brief halt might be explained in a hundred ways, but here she must have kept the nervous, restive stallion for a full hour, or even more. Such marks could not have been made in a much shorter period. Finally, he saw on a gravelly ledge a place where she had sat down. Most certainly her actions were strange. He was’ so perturbed in the effort to un- ravel the meaning that he swung from his horse and sat down on the identical ledge where she must have been only a short time before. Then light broke upon him. For from that position, looking between two low ridges of rock at his left, he found himself staring down past the tops of the cottonwoods and onto the exact site of his late camp. There was still a faint column of smoke wavering up from the fire which he had hastily extinguished with sand—a slender mark against the atmosphere no more distinct than the tracery of a slate pencil over a slate. OOOLK CONMUC (C@