At noon we camped, and cooked a bite of dinner while
the horses grazed; ate it, and went on again.
About three o'clock, as nearly as I could tell, we dipped into a wooded
creek bottom some two hundred yards in width. The creek itself went
brawling along in a deep-worn channel, and when my horse got knee deep
in the water he promptly stopped and plunged his muzzle into the stream.
I gave him slack rein, and let him drink his fill. The others kept on,
climbed the short, steep bank, and passed from sight over its rim. I
swung down from my horse on the brink of the creek, cinched the saddle
afresh, and rolled a cigarette. If I thought about them getting the
start of me at all, it was to reflect that they couldn't get a lead of
more than two or three hundred yards, at the gait they traveled. Judge
then of my surprise when I rode up out of the water-washed gully and
found them nowhere in sight. I pulled up and glanced about, but the
clumps of scrubby timber were just plentiful enough to cut off a clear
view of the flat. So I fell back on the simple methods of the plainsman
and Indian and jogged along on their trail.
Not for many days did I learn truly how I came to miss them, how and why
they had vanished from the face of the earth so completely in the few
minutes I lingered in the gulch.
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