the situation, his mind, too,
was concentrated on the thing before him.

"Do you think it is rustlers? Is that what you mean?" she asked quickly.

"Wait a minute and I'll tell you what I think." He finished making his
observations and returned to her. "First, I'll tell you something else,
something that nobody in the neighborhood knows but you and Jim Yeager.
I belong to the ranger force. Lieutenant O'Connor sent me here to clean
up this rustling that has been going on for several years."

"And a lot of the boys thought you were a rustler yourself," she
commented.

"So did one or two of the young ladies," he smiled. "But that is not the
business before this meeting. Because I'm trained to it I notice things
you wouldn't. For instance, I saw a man the other day with a horse whose
hind hoof left a trail like that."

He pointed to one, and then another track in the soft sand. "Maybe that
might be a coincidence, but the owner of that horse had a habit of
squirting tobacco juice on clean rocks--like that--and that."

"That doesn't prove he has been rustling."

"No; but the signs here show he has been branding, and Buck Weaver ran
across these same marks left by a waddy who surely was making free with
a Twin Star calf."

"How long has he been gone?"

"There were two of them, and they've been gone about twenty minutes."

"How do you know?"

He pointed to a stain of tobacco juice still moist.

"Who is he?" she asked.

He knew her stanch loyalty to her friends, and Tom Dixon had been a
friend till very lately. He hesitated; then, without answering, made a
second thorough examination of the whole ground.

"Come--if we have any luck, I'll show him to you," he said, returning to
her. "But you must do just as I say--must be under my orders."

"I will," she promised.

Forthwith, they started. After they had ridden in silence for some
distance, covering ground fast, they drew to a walk.

"You know by the trail for where they were heading," she suggested in a
voice that was a question.

"I guessed."

Presently, at the entrance to a little canon, Keller swung down and
examined the ground carefully, seemed satisfied, and rode with her into
the gully. But she noticed that now he went cautiously, eyes narrowed
and wary, with the hard face and the look of a coiled spring she had
seen on him before. Her heart drummed with excitement. She was not
afraid, but she was fearfully alive.

At the other entrance to the can