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Most likely they were dead by now, Daylight thought, as he turned in the saddle and looked back across the canyon at the ancient dump and dark mouth of the tunnel. As on the previous day, just for the joy of it, he followed cattle-trails at haphazard and worked his way up toward the summits.
He visited every outfit and greeted the owner or the foreman with the same words in every case. "I've come to cut your herd for my brand." That was the law of the cattle-trails; every man had the right to seek out his strays in the country through which he had passed. But it was not the custom along the Pecos.
Yet it was not without a certain thrill of exaltation that we strapped on our packs and stretched our legs after four days on the dusty plush. And though ahead of us lay no shady, amiably crooked country roads and bosky dells, wherein one might lounge and dawdle over Hazlitt, yet we knew how crisscross cattle-trails should take us skirting down the river's sixteen miles of awe.
We leave camp at 8:20. I put out fire while men are packing. Find track of small five-toed animal on the trail. We go by cattle-trails a short cut to Swamp Point through the forest, over ridges, through thickets and some of the grassy valleys. Out on Swamp Point again I am shown Bass Camp on the south rim. It is scarcely discernible even with glasses, the distance is so vast.
She had Ward doubled over the horn again and shouting so that the canyon walls roared echoes for three full minutes. "I've always wanted to hear the Chisholm Trail. I know how it was sung from Mexico north on the old cattle-trails, and how every ambitious puncher who had enough imagination and could make a rhyme, added a verse or so, till it's really a a classic of the cow-camps."
Drazk knew nothing about the theory of the thing; all that concerned him was the fact that by mid-afternoon the wind would probably change to the west. Two miles down the valley he found a gully which gave access to the water's edge. He descended, located a ford, and crossed. There were cattle-trails through the cottonwoods; he might have followed them, but he feared the telltale shoe-prints.
Circling around to the right and dropping down along the cattle-trails, he quested for another way back to Sonoma Valley; but the cattle-trails seemed to fade out, and the chaparral to grow thicker with a deliberate viciousness and even when he won through in places, the canon and small feeders were too precipitous for his horse, and turned him back. But there was no irritation about it.
The man was Vanamee beyond all doubt, and a little later Presley, descending the maze of cow-paths and cattle-trails that led down towards the Broderson Creek, overtook his friend. Instantly Presley was aware of an immense change.
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