"You haven't any curiosity about such things as books," she retorted.
"To be sure, why should you have?"
Again, leaving the cabin, she went before him. Going straight across the
plateau, she showed him where one could clamber up a steep way to the
ridge. Once up there, it was but ten minutes until, in a hollow, they
found the monument marking a trail, a stone set upon a boulder.
It was after five o'clock. When, following the trail back and forth in
its winding along the side of the ridge, they found the signs they
sought, it was fast growing dark. But there, in a narrow defile where
loose soil had filtered down, were tracks left by a large boot. Lee went
down on his hands and knees to study them in the dusk. He got up with a
little grunt and moved down the trail. Again he found tracks, this time
more clearly defined. So dark was it now that they had lighted several
matches.
"Two men," he announced wonderingly. "Fresh tracks, too. Made this
morning or last night, I'll bet. One coming east from Indian Head. The
other coming west from the plateau behind us. Who's _he_? Where'd he
come from?"
"He's the second of the two men who shot at you," said Judith quickly.
"Don't I know every trail in this neck of the woods, Bud Lee? He
followed another old, worn-out trail on the south side of the ranch.
They met here just as I knew they would!"
"What for?" Lee frowned through the darkness at her eager face. "What
would they want to get together for? If they had any sense they would
scatter and clean out of the country."
"Unless," Judith reminded him, "they don't intend to clean out at all!
Unless they mean to stick to the cliffs and try their hands again at
their sort of game. They'll figure that we will expect them to be a long
way from here by now, won't they? Then where would they be safer than
right here in these mountains? Give me a rifle and something to eat and
I'll defy an army getting me out there. And think of it: If this is
Trevors's work, if he means business, think what two gunmen on these
heights could do to us. They could pick off a three-thousand-dollar
stallion down in the pens; they could drop more than one prize bull or
cow; and," she added sharply, "if they thought about girls as some men
think, they could take a chance on scaring Judith Sanford out of the
country."
Lee stared at her a long time in silence.
"I wouldn't have said," he offered finally, "that Bayne Trevors would
make quite so strong a play as that."
"You wouldn't! Then look him in the eye! And where's his risk, if he's
picked the right men, if he sees them through, keeping the back door open
when they want to run for it? You just gamble your boots, Bud Lee, that
Bayne Trevors . . ."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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