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Updated: May 10, 2025
Just before sundown would do very well, he decided. He would catch Estan Medina off his guard, and he would have the evening before him, in case he wanted to scout amongst the arroyos on the way home. Starr very much wanted to know who drove an automobile without lights into isolated arroyos and over the desert trails at night.
They mounted and rode up the hill, looking for breaks in the fences and counting the colts, some of whom, luxuriously lazy in the heat of the sun, stood with lowered heads, drowsing. Others, scattered about the hillsides and in the arroyos, grazed nippingly at the sparse bunch-grass, moving quickly from clump to clump.
It was a land of desolation an extension of the Mojave Desert on the south, and the alkaline flats and mineral mountains of Nevada on the north, of Death Valley and the Funeral Mountains of California to the northwest a burned-out land of grim-looking mountains extending north and south across our way; a dried-out, washed-out, and wind-swept land of extensive flats and arroyos; a land of rock and gravel cemented in marls and clay; ungraced with any but the desert plants, cactus and thorny shrubs, with little that was pleasing or attractive.
The desert's surface between the lava ridge and the higher hills of the range to eastward was cut by dry washes and arroyos and miniature ridges studded with giant cactus. On the top of one of these high rises the horseman suddenly reined in his mount and stared into the south. "There's trouble an' spelled with a capital T!" he ejaculated.
Because they had no human means of knowing anything about the black automobile that bad whirled across the mesa to the southeast and left its mysterious passengers in one of the arroyos that leads into the Sandias Mountains near Coyote Springs, nine cowpuncher deputy-sheriffs bored their way steadily through sun and wind and thirst, traveling due northwest, keeping always on the trail of the six horses that traveled steadily before them Always a day's march behind, always watching hopefully for some sign of delay for an encouraging freshness in the tracks that would show a lessening distance between the two parties, Luck and his Happy Family rode from dawn till dusk, from another dawn to another dusk.
One thing seems certain, however, they don't mean to harm us, at least not yet." The rear guard closed up again, necessitating silence once more. All night they traveled, ambling at the plainsman's "trotecito" when opportunity offered, and then again slacking to a crawling walk where the baked ground grew uneven and criss-crossed with gullies and arroyos.
Sometimes I found them in the dry arroyos or water-courses, and threw stones at them. They rarely ran away at once at full speed, but for the most part went a little distance and sat up to look at me, waiting for two or three stones, until they made up their minds that I was decidedly dangerous.
Behind them was the beautiful green Panamint Valley, but before and below them for miles and miles, as far as the eye could reach, a flat, white desert, empty even of sage-brush, unrolled toward the horizon. In the immediate foreground a broken system of arroyos, and little cañóns tumbled down to meet it. To the north faint blue hills shouldered themselves above the horizon.
Now, riding like mad, they veered to the northeast, and a grand race was on between the hidden three and the would-be rescuers; all heading for that part of the low-rolling prairie where the lone courier might next be expected to come into view; friends and foes alike, unconscious of the fact that, following one of those crooked arroyos with its stiff and precipitous banks, he had been turned from his true course full three quarters of a mile, and now, with a longer run, but a clear field ahead, was steering straight for Frayne.
A dozen varieties of cactus, portulaccas, geraniums, petunias, verbenas, scattered over the prairie, morning-glories and sunflowers in the arroyos and along the creeks, and many a flower nameless to the general, abounded. So, it should be added, did in their season plover, snipe, ducks, and geese.
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