The print of steel-rimmed hoofs showed
in the soft loam as plainly as a moccasin-track in virgin snow. Around a
grove of quaking-aspens, eternally shivering in the deadest of calms,
their trail led through the long grass that carpeted the bottom, and
suddenly ended in a strip of gravelly land that ran out from the bed of
the creek. I could follow it no farther. If there was other mark of
their passing, it was hidden from me.
Wondering, and a bit exasperated, I spurred straight up the bank, and
when I had reached the high benchland loped to a point that overlooked
the little valley a full mile up and down. Cottonwood and willow,
cut-bank and crooning water, lay green and brown and silver-white
before, but no riders, no thing that moved in the shape of men came
within the scope of my eyes. But I wasn't done yet. I turned away from
the bank and raced up a long slope to a saw-backed ridge that promised
largely of unobstructed view. Dirty gray lather stood out in spumy rolls
around the edge of the saddle-blanket, and the wet flanks of my horse
heaved like the shoulders of a sobbing woman when I checked him on top
of a bald sandstone peak--and though as much of the Northwest as one
man's eye may hope to cover lay bared on every hand, yet the quartet
that rode with me from Fort Walsh occupied no part of the landscape.
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