"I came down by the trail, Mrs. Horton." And then I told her about Guard, thus accounting for the gun, which I had caught her glancing at, once or twice, rather curiously. "Young dogs are foolish," was her comment, when she had heard the story. "If he was older, I should tell you not to be a mite worried, but as he's a young one, it's different. I've known a young dog to get on a hot trail, and follow it until he was completely lost. My father lost a fine deerhound that way once. The dog got on the trail of a buck, and last we ever heard of him he was twenty miles away, and still going. I do hope you won't have such bad luck with your dog." I bade good-by to Mrs. Horton, and started homeward, again taking the trail through the ravine. I was not much cheered by her words in regard to Guard, and heavily depressed by the knowledge that Mr. Horton had, after all, beaten Mr. Wilson and Jessie in his start for town--though what difference it could make, either way, until the Land Office was open in the morning no one could have told. Being troubled, I walked slowly, this time, with my eyes on the ground. Half-way through the ravine I came to a point where a break in the walls let in the sunlight. Through this low, ragged depression the light was streaming in in a long, brilliant shaft as I approached the spot. The warm, bright column of golden light had so strange an effect, lighting up the gray rocks and the moist, reeking pathway, that I paused to admire it. "If it were only a rainbow, now," I thought, "I should look under the end of it, there, for a bag of gold." My eyes absently followed the column of light to the point where it seemed suddenly to end in the darkness of the ravine, and I uttered a startled cry. Under the warm, bright light I saw the distinct impression of a dog's foot. It was as clearly defined in the oozy reek as it would have been had some one purposely taken a cast of it, but after the first start, I reflected that it did not necessarily follow that the print was made by Guard. Still, examination showed that it might well be his. Searching farther, I found more tracks--above the break in the wall, but none in the ravine below it. The footprints had been a good deal marred by my own as I came down the ravine, and, what I thought most singular, supposing the tracks to have been made by Guard, there were also the hoof-marks of a horse--not a range-horse, for this one wore shoes, and, developing Indian lore as I studied the trail, I presently made the important discovery that, while the dog's tracks occasionally overlaid those of the horse, the horse's tracks never covered the dog's. Clearly, then, if those footprints belonged to Guard, as I had a quite unaccountable conviction that they did, he was quietly following some horseman. For an indignant instant I suspected some reckless cowboy of having lassoed and stolen him, but a little further study of the footprints spoiled that theory. Guard would have resisted