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As Rathburn snapped the padlock and thrust the keys into his pocket his eyes again sought the trail to the left above him. No one was in sight. The man and the boy had disappeared in a bend or depression in the trail. But when he looked down toward the hogback he saw a car coming up the road toward the mine. A number of horsemen had taken its place on the hogback. Rathburn ran for his horse.
An observer would have gleaned at once that the rider was not familiar with the trail or territory he traversed. So it was past noon when he finally reached the hogback where the outstanding event of the morning had taken place. The rider looked back up toward the divide and grinned as he rested his horse just above the scene of the holdup.
This he followed down toward town, and in half an hour he dismounted in the timber behind a small cabin at the side of the road to the hogback. Rathburn went to the rear door and knocked. He received no answer, but sounds came to him through an open window. He opened the door softly and stole inside. There was no one in the kitchen. The sounds came from another room.
There the man in the slicker and his companion joined him, mounted, and the trio rode quickly along the hogback in a southerly direction and disappeared on a blind rail into the forest. Rathburn rolled himself another cigarette with a grin as he watched the truck driver stand for some moments uncertainly in the road and then start rapidly down the slope toward his disabled machine.
Mannix laughed harshly. "You're clever, Sautee; there's no getting away from how clever you are. Now you want me to go chasing up to the hogback to head him off. Well, I'm tellin' you that I don't know where he's gone, an' I ain't starting out after him at any two o'clock in the morning. If you'd have kept your nose out of this he'd still be all safe an' quiet in jail.
"And I always until I find you or you find me." ... Presently she laughed gaily under her breath: "A solemn bargain, isn't it?" "More solemn than marriage." "Yes," said the girl faintly. Something went crashing off into the woods as they reached the hogback which linked them with the group of pines whither the big game-bird had pitched into cover.
We started in pitch darkness and for three hours rode through a night so black that I could not see my pony's ears. The trail, which in places was barely a foot wide, ran for miles along a sort of hogback, the ground falling sheer away on either side. It was like riding blindfolded along the ridgepole of a church, and, had my pony slipped, the results would have been the same.
After holding her direction at a stiff lope till satisfied that she had passed the men she angled across to intersect their course. As Papoose topped a low hogback that flanked the valley she saw the men riding toward her down the bottoms, driving twenty or more head of cows.
Campote is completely surrounded by mountains, the hogback dropping off into the valley below us. About four or five hundred people had assembled, men, women, and children. As a rule, they were small and well built, but not so well built as the tribes farther north. The men were fully armed with spears, bows and arrows, shields, and head-knives; gee-strings apart, they were naked.
Rathburn could not forget the look on the girl's face when she had asked him about the activities of the officer in the automobile. Nor could he forget the expression in her eyes during her altercation with Carlisle that day. After he had passed the cabin, Rathburn checked his pace and proceeded more slowly up the long stretches of road to the hogback.
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