he found it.

"He's slipped us," Van Horn called out when Doubleday arrived, "but
I've got his trail."

"Two hundred and fifty dollars to the man that gets him!" shouted
Doubleday, huskily. Some of the boys gave a whoop and began to look
around, but they did not scatter much.

Van Horn, losing no time, led Doubleday part way up the break along
which he had crawled. Telltale traces of blood at irregular intervals,
sometimes imprinted as if by a hand on the flat face of rock that
bedded the wash; sometimes smeared on a starving bunch of grass, where
it clung desperately to a crevice in the scant soil--all so slight and
so well concealed that only the mere chance of Van Horn's crawling up
the very break chosen by Hawk for his escape to the creek had revealed
it to his pursuers. The tracker took the slender trail, followed the
wounded rustler to the creek bottom and thence down the creek to its
junction with the North Fork. There they lost the trail in a pool of
water, nor could they pick it up again.

A mile below the fork of the Turkey stood Jim Laramie's cabin. The
raiders had already entered on his land; his cattle and some of his
horses were, in fact, grazing in and about the creek fork. The
following of Hawk's trail had been a nerve-racking job. Hawk, his
enemies knew, might be waiting at any turn in it and that meant, in all
probability, death for someone. In consequence, the pioneering fell
chiefly on Van Horn; even Stone showed little stomach for the job. But
the trail was completely lost.

"There's a bunch of horses grazing at the fork," reported Van Horn, as
Doubleday reached the front, "Laramie's, I guess--anyway, the trail's
gone."

A council was held. Doubleday, long-headed and crafty, listened to all
that was said. Van Horn finally asked for his opinion.

"I don't know no more than the rest of you; but a blind man can figure
a few things out. He's hit, ain't he?" Barb put the question as one
not to be gainsaid and found none to say him nay. "He's looking for
help, that's more'n likely, ain't it? He's a mile from Jim Laramie's
cabin, not more; he's three miles from anybody else's--what?" he
exclaimed, as Bill Bradley interrupted to suggest that it was less than
two miles over to Ben Simeral's. "All right," shouted Barb, "Hawk's
here, ain't he? He's close to Laramie. Laramie's his friend. Where
would he go--what?"

Chopping his ideas out as with an ax, Doubleday showed his companio