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Just now Lone was stirred beyond his usual depth of emotion, and it was not altogether the sight of Fred Thurman's battered body that unnerved him. He wanted to believe that Thurman's death was purely an accident, the accident it appeared. But Lorraine and the telltale hoofprints by the rock compelled him to believe that it was not an accident.
Besides, these flat-faced ledges frequently formed a sharp dividing line between barren land and fertile, and the hoofprints led that way; so it was with a tacit understanding that they would see what lay beyond the ridge that they rode forward.
If either Texans or Mexicans had passed they wanted to know why, and when. They came at last to hoofprints in the soft bank of the river, indicating that horses undoubtedly with men on their backs had crossed here. The skilled trailers calculated the number at more than fifteen, perhaps more than twenty, and they followed their path across the timber and out upon the prairie.
Just now Lone was stirred beyond his usual depth of emotion, and it was not altogether the sight of Fred Thurman's battered body that unnerved him. He wanted to believe that Thurman's death was purely an accident, the accident it appeared. But Lorraine and the telltale hoofprints by the rock compelled him to believe that it was not an accident.
Occasionally he swung his long leg across the rump of the horse and dismounted to stoop down for a closer examination of the hoofprints he was following. They were not recent tracks. He happened to know that they were about three days old. Plain as a printed book was the story they told him. The horses that had made these tracks had been ridden by men in a desperate hurry.
Dismounting, she led her horse slowly along the brink at her right; and so came at length to the spot where the trail dropped to the first incline. It seemed incredible; but then, even as the word framed itself in her mind, her heart bounded up into her throat. There there under her eyes were hoofprints, the print of steel shoes in the sand; and they went down, down, down.
Among them Davis of the St. Louis train, who had been too ill to take part in the struggle. One more loss was there to report, but it was not discovered until later. Indians seldom leave their dead on the field of battle, but the blood-stained sod beside their fallen ponies told a story of heavy toll. Blood marked the trail of hoofprints to the northwest in their wild rout thither.
On his return he found neither wife nor lodge, but footprints and hoofprints in the ground showed to his keen eye that it was the Arapahoes who had been there. Getting on their trail he rode over it furiously, and at night had reached Oak Canon, along which he travelled until he saw the gleam of a small fire ahead.
It was when he was riding slowly around the boulder marked "Palace Hotel, Rates Reasnible," that he came upon the place where a horse had stood, on the side best sheltered from the storm. Deep hoof marks closely overlapping, an overturned stone here and there gave proof enough, and the rain-beaten soil that blurred the hoofprints farthest from the rock told him more.
And then a joy to be long remembered I went on a hunting trip with Tom and Cowan and three others where the Kentucky tumbles between its darkly wooded cliffs. And other wonders of that strange land I saw then for the first time: great licks, trampled down for acres by the wild herds, where the salt water oozes out of the hoofprints.
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