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A glance showed him the coast was clear. Running across the tracks, he joined Lane, who was waiting for him behind the freight-car with impatience. In silence they mounted their horses. For a short distance McKee led the way upon the railroad-track, in order to leave no hoof-prints, and then struck across the desert toward the hills in the south. "Why did you shoot?" gasped Lane.
On the right hand and on the left stretched the boundless prairie, dotted with leafless groves and bordered by gray wintry forests; scorched by the fires kindled in the dried grass by Indian hunters, and strewn with the carcasses and the bleached skulls of innumerable buffalo. The plains were scored with their pathways, and the muddy edges of the river were full of their hoof-prints.
Another trail joined the one they were following and ran with and on top of it. This, he reasoned, had been made by one of the strays and would turn away soon. He kept his eyes looking well ahead and soon saw that he was right in his surmise, and without checking the speed of his horse in the slightest degree he went ahead on the trail of the smaller hoof-prints.
I was riding straight along under the mountain-side when Black Boy swerved almost right round and went off in another direction: that and the darkness threw them off the track, but they will be sure to strike my trail in the morning. Black Boy's hoof-prints will be plain enough in the soft earth where the rain has not washed them away, and they'll come on after me like a pack of hungry wolves.
I found hoof-prints in plenty in the turf beside the drive, and a track of them through the lettuce-bed in the garden. More than that, behind the stable I found where a horse had been tied and had broken away. A piece of worn strap still hung there. It was sufficiently clear, then, that whoever had broken into the house had come on horseback and left afoot.
"I can see nothing," he said, after a minute examination of the ground. "It's thar, though," Dick said, throwing himself off his horse. "Look at this soft piece of ground; that is a hoof-print, and there is another and another." Frank also dismounted and examined the ground. "Yes," he said, "I can see a number of hoof-prints now you point them out. But how do you know that they are Indian prints?"
Brown, who had by this time received his change, put a shilling into her hand, bade his hostess farewell, and, taking the route which the farmer had gone before, walked briskly on, with the advantage of being guided by the fresh hoof-prints of his horse. Meg Merrilies looked after him for some time, and then muttered to herself, "I maun see that lad again and I maun gang back to Ellangowan too.
There were no tracks in it now but the flat hoof-prints of burros and the wire-twined wheel-marks of desert buckboards; even the road was half obliterated by the swoop of the winds which had torn up the hard-packed dirt, yet the going was good and as the racer purred on Virginia settled back in her seat. "I can't believe it," she said at last, "that we're going to leave here, forever.
Suruj Bul, see thou to that; and, O men, put speed into your work, for a runner must go with the news to The Tiger of Gokral-Seetarun. Thereon, Suruj Bul, leaning with his shoulder, brake in the bars of the window, and I, beating her with a whip, made the Havildar's mare skip among the melon-beds till they were much trodden with hoof-prints.
For there are hoof-prints on one of the crossing trails; on the trail which comes from somewhere in the south. The marks are sharp indentations and look fresh, but they terminate as the crossing is reached. Here they have turned off into the bush and are lost to view. The matter is somewhat incomprehensible. But there is something still more incomprehensible about the desolate place.
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