“There has been a big killing at Bald Knob, Lute. Drop everything else. Get together half a dozen good men and ride up to Bovier’s Camp. Bring with you supplies enough for several days. Wait at the camp until you hear from me. Tait and Gilroy killed. By cattlemen, looks like. I’ll know more about that later.” He ate a hurried breakfast, gathered together a couple of sandwiches for lunch, and struck across country for the raided sheep camp. He plunged into the gray desert, keeping the rampart of hills at his left. In the early-morning light the atmosphere gave to the panorama in front of him an extraordinary effect of space. As soon as he came in sight of the sheep camp Matson dismounted and tied his horse. He had to pick up a cold trail covered with snow. The fewer unnecessary tracks the better. The bodies of the sheepmen lay where they had fallen, a light mantle of snow sheeting the still forms. Three empty shells lay close to the rifle of Tait, but Gilroy’s gun had not been fired. It was lying in the wagon, where he had left it when he made his dash to escape. The contour of the country was such that the attack must have been made from in front. Matson put himself in place of the raiders, and guessed with fair accuracy their plan of operations. The sun had already melted most of the snow, and for hours he quartered over the ground, examining tracks that the untrained eye would never have seen. Sometimes a bit of broken brush, sometimes a leaf trampled into the ground, told him what he wanted to know. Again, it was a worn heel plate that stood out to him like a signpost on the road. Twice he picked up an empty shell that had been thrown out of a rifle during the rush forward. The boot tracks, faint though they were, led him to the pine grove where the horses had been tethered. Here he went down on his hands and knees, studying the details of every hoofprint that differentiated it from others. The care with which he did this, the intentness of his observation, would have surprised and perhaps amused a tenderfoot. An unskilled tracker, though he might be a Sherlock Holmes in the city, could have discovered nothing here worth learning. Matson found registered marks of identification for horses as certain as those of the Bertillon system for criminals. With amazing pains he traced the retreat of the raiders to the Three Pines. It was a very difficult piece of trailing, for the snow had wiped out the tracks entirely for stretches of hundreds of yards. Once it was a splash of tobacco juice on a flat rock that told him he was still on the heels of those he wanted. In Shoshone County men will still tell you that Aleck Matson’s feat of running down the night raiders in spite of an intervening snowstorm was the best bit of trailing they ever knew. From the Three Pines the tracks of most of the party took the sheriff straight to the Circle Diamond Ranch. He dropped in just in time to join Mrs. Stovall at her midday dinner.