aid a soldier, saluting, "dat de line
is cut."

At this I was taken with indecent laughter, and turned away, while
ninety summers observed, "Of course them boys would cut the wire if they
knew their business."

Swearing capably, the Major now accounted clearly to us for the whole
occurrence, striding up and down, while we lifted the hurt men into the
ranch wagon, and arranged for their care at Cedar Springs. The escort
wagon hurried on to Thomas for a doctor. The ambulance was, of course,
crippled of half its team, and the dead mules were cleared from their
harness and got to the road-side. Having satisfactorily delivered
himself of his explanation, the Major now organized a party for
following the trail of the robbers, to learn into what region they had
betaken themselves. Incredible as it may seem, after my late
unenterprising conduct, I asked one of the riders to lend me his horse,
which he did, remarking that he should not need it for an hour, and that
he was willing to risk my staying absent longer than that.

So we rode away. The trail was clear, and we had but little trouble to
follow it. It took us off to the right through a mounded labyrinth of
hillocks, puny and gray like ash-heaps, where we rose and fell in the
trough of the sullen landscape. I told Pidcock of my certainty about
three of the robbers, but he seemed to care nothing for this, and was
something less than civil at what he called my suggestions.

"When I have ascertained their route," he said, "it will be time enough
to talk of their identity."

In this way we went for a mile or so, the trail leading us onward, frank
and straight, to the top of a somewhat higher hill, where it suddenly
expired off the earth. No breath vanishes cleaner from glass, and it
brought us to a dead halt. We retraced the tracks to make sure we had
not lost them before, but there was no mistake, and again we halted dead
at the vanishing-point. Here were signs that something out of the common
had happened. Men's feet and horseshoe prints, aimless and superimposed,
marked a trodden frame of ground, inside which was nothing, and beyond
which nothing lay but those faint tracks of wandering cattle and horses
that scatter everywhere in this country. Not one defined series, not
even a single shod horse, had gone over this hill, and we spent some
minutes vainly scouring in circles wider and wider. Often I returned to
stare at the trodden, imperturbable frame of ground, and caug