Without a word Mead turned sharply on his heel and ran with long strides down Main street toward Delarue's house. The hands of the two men went instinctively to their revolvers, then their eyes met, and Daniels said: "I guess we'd better not touch him, Jim." At that moment Judge Truman turned the corner, just from the court-house, and saw the escaping prisoner. "Let him go, Mr. Sheriff," he said. "His help will be valuable in the search. Better go yourself, and take as many with you as you can. I have adjourned court and told everybody to hurry out to the mesa, and I'm going myself as soon as I can get a horse." Emerson Mead ran at the top of his speed to the Delarue house, going there without thought of why he did it, feeling only that Marguerite was in deepest trouble, and all his mind filled with the idea that it would kill her if anything happened to the child. As he entered the gate Marguerite saw him and rushed down from the veranda. "How did it happen?" he asked hastily. "I took him out to walk with me on the mesa yesterday afternoon, and he slipped away from me and I could not find him." "Can you tell me where you saw him last?" "Let me go with you! I can show you the very place!" "Are you strong enough? Can you stand it? You are very pale!" "Yes, yes! It will not be so hard as to stay here and wait! Let me go with you and help you!" "Come, then, quick!" She snatched her little white sunbonnet from a chair on the porch and they hurried off. Walking swiftly and silently they passed through the back streets of the town and across vacant lots and hurried over the rising plain until they came to the place in the rolling hills where the child had disappeared. "It was here," said Marguerite. "I am very sure of the place. He stood beside me and while I was thinking about--something that troubled me, and reading a letter, he slipped away. I was sure he had only run down the hill into the arroyo, but when I looked for him, and it seemed hardly more than a minute, I could not find him." Mead looked about for footprints, but the ground had been trampled by scores of feet since the night before, and tracks of shoes in many sizes covered the sandy earth. A few scattered searchers were near them, but the great mass of people could be seen in groups and bunches trailing off over the hills, most of them headed to the northeast. A shout came along the line and one of the men near by ran across the hills to learn its cause. "What had he been talking about?" Mead asked. "About Heaven and our mother, and if he could see her if he should go there." Mead looked about him, thinking there was no clue in that, when his glance rested upon the towering peaks of the Hermosa range, their western slopes soft in the violet shadows of the forenoon, their upreared crags seeming to lean against the very blue of the sky. A sudden memory from his own childish years flashed into his mind.