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The bluffs intercept the view, and the rolls on the prairie can hide successfully a large bunch of cattle or horses, and it may take a week to beat up a country thickly strewn with bluffs, and diversified with coulees that might easily be searched in a single afternoon. The close of the third day found the travellers on Wakota trail.
From them he learned the direction which Miss Allen had taken when she left them, and he rode that way and never stopped until he had gone down off the benchland and had left the fringe of coulees and canyons behind. Pink and the Native Son had just come from down in here, and they had seen no sign of either her or the Kid.
The Shadow Falls Lightly. Over the green uplands, into the coulées and the brushy creek-bottoms swept the sun-browned riders of the Double-Crank; jangling and rattling over untrailed prairie sod, the bed and mess wagons followed after with hasty camping at the places Billy appointed for brief sleeping and briefer eating, a hastier repacking and then the hurry over the prairies to the next stop.
As he topped at last the final rise which put him on a level with the great undulating bench-land gashed here and there with coulees and narrow gulches that gave no evidence of their existence until one rode quite close, he lifted his head and gazed about him half regretfully, half proudly.
So the fire was stopped well outside the fence which marked the boundary of the Happy Family's claims. All west of there and far to the north the hills and the coulees lay black as far as one could see which was to the rim of the hills which bordered Dry Lake valley on the east. Here and there a claim-shack stood forlorn amid the blackness.
Now among the dark shadows of the pines, now in the gray sagebrush, lost in the coulees, but ceaselessly on and on, wound this figure of the night. The wolves sniffed along on the trail, but came no nearer. All night long he pursued his way, his muscles playing tirelessly to the demands of a mind as taut as bowstring.
Not a sage quivered to show the position of bodies crawling through the brush; no rattle of gravel indicated the presence of men working down through any of the sheltered coulees behind; yet he knew they were near. The silence was in sharp contrast to the rumble and roar of the stampede just past.
With every mile, almost, the hills became higher and more conical; outcroppings of rock began to appear; and the little streams ran in gorges now, instead of coulées. In the rougher country the horse's access of courage soon failed. His wind was gone, he sobbed for breath; and Garth was presently reduced to the necessity of leading him up every incline.
The scrub willows gave place to patches of bull pine and the long stretches of buffalo grass to ugly bare patches of black rock. In and out of the scrub timber they wended, following deep coulees to their sources and crossing steep-pitched divides into other coulees.
We want more bridges, graded roads through the coulées, a stockyard on the railroad, and some day a branch line; and with all deference to you, we mean to get them. If this is impossible under present conditions, those conditions must be changed." There was a murmur of approval, but watching Colonel Carrington I knew that the man had said too much.
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