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"We're getting through, Jack," spoke Scout Trudeau, toward morning. "But we'll have to do better. Will you risk day travel with me, so we can finish up. There are anxious hearts, back yonder; and by this time the boys are suffering something fearful." "I'm game, 'Pet." So they did not stop, with daylight. Keeping to the coulees or washes, and the draws, and the stream beds, they zigzagged on.
To the east, to the south, to the north went the riders of the Wishbone, gathering the cattle which the fires had driven afar. No rivers stopped them, nor mountains, nor the deep-scarred coulees, nor the plains.
I left my men there and told them to hold that position and then I rushed around the hills and came up to the north end of the field near where the monument now stands. And I saw hundreds and hundreds of Indians in the coulees all around. The Indians dismounted and tied their horses in a bunch and got down into the coulees, shooting at the soldiers from all sides.
In days gone by her adventurous, lonely spirit had driven her to the prairies, savagely riding her Indian pony through the streets of Manitou and out on the North Trail, or south through coulees, or westward into the great woods, looking for what: she never found. Her spirit was no longer the vague thing driving here and there with pleasant torture.
Now, it is one of the peculiarities of prairie landscape that where whole counties may appear to be one general level or open slopes when viewed from the distance, the face of the country is really cut up in countless directions by ravines, watercourses and coulées, so that, except in the level bottom-lands along a river-bed, it is next to impossible to keep moving objects continually in view.
In five minutes the worst of it was right over me, and one flash came on top of the other so fast it was like a big eye winking through the clouds. One second the hills and coulées would show plain as day, and next you'd have to feel to find the ears of your horse.
At nine o'clock a party came out from Dry Lake, learned that the Kid was not yet found, and went out under a captain to comb systematically through the hills and the coulees. Before night all the able-bodied men in the country and some who were not were searching.
"How are we going to find them?" asked the girl, as the two drew their mounts to a stand on the top of a low ridge and gazed out over the sea of similar ridges that rolled and spread before them as far as the eye could reach in three directions bare coulees, and barer ridges, with here and there a low bare hill, all black and red and grey, with studdings of mica flashing in the rays of the afternoon sun.
For two miles he kept the pace unbroken, though the way was not of the smoothest and there was no trail to follow. Straight away to the west, with fifteen miles of hills and coulees between, lay Dry Lake; and in Dry Lake lived the one man in the country who might save Patsy. "Old Dock" was a land-mark among old-timers.
Twilight began to creep in upon him, like veils of cool, dry mist out of the horizons. And hour after hour he went on, eating a strip of pemmican when he grew hungry, and drinking in the spring coulées when he came to them, where the water was cold and clear. Not until a telltale cramp began to bite warningly in his leg did he stop for the rest which he knew he must take. It was one o'clock.
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