He made short work of catching up the few articles they were to carry with them and of stamping into dead coals the few remaining glowing embers of their fire. Then, striding ahead, he led the way. And for a matter of a mile or more she was hard beset to keep up with him. The day was filled with happenings to divert their thoughts from any one channel. They startled, in a tiny meadow, three deer, which shot away through a tangle of brush, leaping, plunging, shooting forward and down a slope like great, gleaming, graceful arrows. "A man could live like a king here, with a rifle," said Deveril longingly. They saw a tall, thin wisp of smoke an hour before noon; it stood against the sky to the southwest of them, at a distance of perhaps two miles. "Taggart's noonday camp," they decided, deciding further that Taggart must have insisted on an early start, and therefore had found his stomach demanding lunch well before midday. Later, some two or three hours after twelve, they heard the long, reverberating crack and rumble and echo of a rifle-shot. "Taggart's crowd, killing a deer or bear or rabbit," they imagined. And all along they were contented, making what time they could through the open spaces, over the ridges, down through tiny green valleys and up long, dreary slopes, resting frequently, never hastening beyond their powers, secure in knowing that the Taggart trail and the Lynette-Deveril trail, though paralleling, would have no common point of contact before both trails ran into the country in the vicinity of the Big Bear Creek, the rim of the Timber-Wolf country. "The whole thing," exulted Babe Deveril, "lies in the fact that we know where they are and they haven't the least idea where we are! We know where they are going, and they haven't a guess which way we are steering...." "Do you know," said Lynette thoughtfully, "I don't believe that Mexicali Joe intends for a minute to lead them to his gold!" Deveril looked at her in astonishment. "You don't! Why, couldn't you see that Taggart put the fear of the Lord into him? That Gallup, slick as wet soap, tricked him? That...." She broke in impatiently, saying: "Yet Joe.... He seemed to me to give in to them in something too much of a hurry ... as though he had his own wits about him, his own last card in the hole, as dad used to say. I wonder...." He stared at her, puzzled. "When you _feel_ things," he muttered, none too pleasantly, "you get me guessing. I don't know yet how you came to know that the Taggart bunch was at our heels yesterday. But you did know; and you were right. As to this other hunch of yours...." "You'll see," said Lynette serenely. "Joe isn't the biggest fool in that crowd of four. You wait and see." "You'll give me the creeps yet," said Deveril.