the escaping prisoner.

"Let him go, Mr. Sheriff," he said. "His help will be valuable in the
search. Better go yourself, and take as many with you as you can. I
have adjourned court and told everybody to hurry out to the mesa, and
I'm going myself as soon as I can get a horse."

Emerson Mead ran at the top of his speed to the Delarue house, going
there without thought of why he did it, feeling only that Marguerite
was in deepest trouble, and all his mind filled with the idea that it
would kill her if anything happened to the child. As he entered the
gate Marguerite saw him and rushed down from the veranda.

"How did it happen?" he asked hastily.

"I took him out to walk with me on the mesa yesterday afternoon, and
he slipped away from me and I could not find him."

"Can you tell me where you saw him last?"

"Let me go with you! I can show you the very place!"

"Are you strong enough? Can you stand it? You are very pale!"

"Yes, yes! It will not be so hard as to stay here and wait! Let me go
with you and help you!"

"Come, then, quick!"

She snatched her little white sunbonnet from a chair on the porch and
they hurried off. Walking swiftly and silently they passed through the
back streets of the town and across vacant lots and hurried over the
rising plain until they came to the place in the rolling hills where
the child had disappeared.

"It was here," said Marguerite. "I am very sure of the place. He stood
beside me and while I was thinking about--something that troubled me,
and reading a letter, he slipped away. I was sure he had only run down
the hill into the arroyo, but when I looked for him, and it seemed
hardly more than a minute, I could not find him."

Mead looked about for footprints, but the ground had been trampled by
scores of feet since the night before, and tracks of shoes in many
sizes covered the sandy earth. A few scattered searchers were near
them, but the great mass of people could be seen in groups and bunches
trailing off over the hills, most of them headed to the northeast. A
shout came along the line and one of the men near by ran across the
hills to learn its cause.

"What had he been talking about?" Mead asked.

"About Heaven and our mother, and if he could see her if he should go
there."

Mead looked about him, thinking there was no clue in that, when his
glance rested upon the towering peaks of the Hermosa range, their
western slopes soft in the violet shadows of the foren