e sleepy thirty mile ride to
Harte's Camp. He rode slowly now, allowing Hap Smith's speeding horses
to draw swiftly away ahead of him. He saw the stage once more climbing a
distant ridge; then it was lost to him in the steepening hills. A little
more than an hour later he turned off to the left, leaving the
county road and entering the mouth of the canyon through which his trail
led. He would not see the road again although after a while he would
parallel it with some dozen miles of rolling land between him and it.

Behind him lay the wide stretch of plain in which Dry Town was set;
about him were the small shut-in valleys where the "little fellows" had
their holdings and small herds of long horns and saddle ponies. Before
him were the mountains with Kemble's place upon their far slope and his
own home range lying still farther to the east. There were many streams
to ford in the country through which he was now riding, all
muddy-watered, laced with white, frothing edgings, but none to rise
higher than his horse's belly.

Here there was a tiny valley, hardly more than a cup in the hills, but
valuable for its rich feed and for the big spring set in the middle of
it. He dismounted, slipped the Spanish bit from his horse's mouth, and
waited for the animal to drink. It was a still, sleepy afternoon. The
storm had left no trace in the deep blue of the sky; the hills were
rapidly drying under the hot sun. Man and horse seemed sleepy, slow
moving figures to fit into a glowing landscape, harmoniously. The horse
drank slowly, shook its head in half tolerant protest at the flies
singing before its eyes, and played with the water with twitching lips
as though, with no will to take up the trail again, it sought to deceive
its master into thinking that it was still drinking. The man yawned and
his drowsy eyes came away from the wood-topped hills before him to the
moist earth under foot. For the moment they did not seem the eyes of the
Buck Thornton who had ridden to the bank in Dry Town a little before
noon, but were gentle and dreamily meditative with all of the earlier
sharp alertness gone. And then suddenly there came into them a quick
change, a keen brightness, as he jerked his head forward and stared down
at the ground at his feet.

"Now what is she doing out this way?" he asked himself aloud. "And where
is she going?"

Though the soil was cut and beaten with the sharp hoofs of the many
cattle that had drunk here earlier in