He left Sautee at the entrance to the restaurant and strolled around the hotel barn to see that his horse was being taken care of properly. He found that the barn man was indeed looking after the dun in excellent shape. Rathburn spent a short time with his mount, petting him and rubbing his glossy coat with his hands. Then he took his slicker pack and started for the hotel. As he reached the street he saw a girl on a horse talking with a man on the sidewalk. The girl was leaning over, and the man evidently was delivering a harangue. He was gesticulating wildly, and Rathburn could see that the girl was cowering. He paused on the hotel porch as the man stepped away from the horse and looked his way. He recognized Carlisle. Then the girl rode down the street and Rathburn started with surprise as he saw she was the girl from the cabin up the road who had directed him to town the day before. He remembered the two objects he had picked up in the road after the holdup and felt in his pocket to make sure they were there. Then he entered the hotel. "Have you a room?" he asked the clerk pleasantly. "Yes. More rooms than anything else to-day since the Sunday crowd's gone." Rathburn wrote his name upon the register. CHAPTER XVIII IN THE NIGHT Rathburn avoided the Red Feather resort during the morning. Instead of walking about the streets or sitting in the hotel lobby or his room, he cultivated the acquaintance of the barn man, and because he knew horses--_all_ about horses--he soon had the man's attention and respect. Although Rathburn suspected that he already had a reputation in the town, he did not know that Carlisle was steadily adding to that reputation through the medium of veiled hints dropped here and there until a majority of the population was convinced that a desperate man was in their midst, and that Mannix had permitted him to go free for certain secret reasons. Thus a web of mystery and suspicion was cleverly woven about Rathburn's movements. It was not until afternoon, however, that Rathburn began to realize on his intimacy with the barn man. Then they began to talk of trails, and for more than an hour the barn man, caught in the spell of Rathburn's personality, divulged the secret of the trails leading to and from the Dixie Queen. "The best trail, an' the straightest, if you should ever want to go up there an' look at the mine like you say," said the barn man, "hits into the timber behind the first cabin to the left above town." Rathburn nodded smilingly. It was the cabin where he had first seen the girl. "It's 'bout twenty-nine miles to the mine by the road," the man explained; "but that trail will take you there in less'n twenty. Well, maybe twenty or twenty-one. Or you can go up the road till you get to the big hogback--that's where they held up the truck driver yesterday--and cut straight up the hill from the south end." "I guess those are the best trails from what you say," was Rathburn's yawning comment.