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"He must have asked somebody passing to wheel him back," thought Tom, who immediately began to play Red Indian or Australian black, and look for the trail to wit, the thin wheel-marks left by the chair. But though he found those which had been made in coming plainly lining the soft sandy road, and ran in different directions toward home, there were no returning tracks.
Oh, agony, which was the road she had taken? It never occurred to me till the following day that I might have been able to track her by the wheel-marks of the gig on the dusty summer road. Instead I desperately resorted to the time-honoured expedient of setting up a stick and going in the direction of its fall.
For a few hundred yards they rode almost due east. Then the wheel-marks turned abruptly to the south, and a little further on Buck noted the prints of a galloping horse beside them. "Lynch, I reckon," he commented, pointing them out to his companion. "When he saw me up on the cliffs down yonder, he must have hustled to catch up with the car."
If this was the vehicle in which the gold had been carried off, and the wheel-marks he was looking at had been made by it, then that gold was probably secreted somewhere in his immediate vicinity. The thick-growing shrubs and stunted gums made it difficult for him to see far from where he stood.
Dale traveled at such a pace that the first long stretch of straight road opening up before his eyes convinced him of his blunder when no cab was in sight. He raced back, dismounted at the crossing, examined the road for wheel-marks, and soon was in the saddle again.
In the open space under the shelter of the bluff where the ground had been so much trampled by horses, the wheel-marks of a vehicle also showed. He walked over and examined them carefully. They were the marks of what was evidently an old and rackety conveyance.
"If ever I meet with a bit of an accident, sir, I always pull up and plan the wheel-marks; I carry a tape for the purpose, and it saves a lot of hard swearing in court afterwards." Brodie spoke seriously, and Devar vowed that he would interrupt no more, since he merely succeeded in stimulating the man's torpid wits.
He went on slowly trying to trace the wheel-marks, but the road soon became so hard that he missed them; a few yards farther on he saw the faint mark made by one, then again two showed, and then they ceased, but he was on the right track, he knew; and walking rapidly on down the hill, with his eyes now on the road, now right ahead toward the river and the ford, he began wondering who could have come along there, and where his uncle had made whoever it was take him.
At the door of Etterick it became apparent that something was astir. Wheel-marks were clear in the gravel, and the ancient butler had an air of ceremony. "Mr. Wratislaw has arrived, sir," he whispered to Lewis, whereat that young man's face shone. "When? How?
One might pass a hundred yards to either side, and never realise its existence, the hard rock, covered by a thin layer of sand, retaining no trace of wheel-marks in guidance. How Moore had ever driven so unerringly to the spot was a mystery.
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