loose, gravelly soil. Sitting on a
boulder, he made a leisurely survey of the place and counted three
cigarette stubs that had fallen short of the crevice toward which they
had evidently been flung. How many had gone into the crevice he could
not tell. He slid off the boulder and, walking on a rock shelf that
jutted out from the huge upthrust rock, examined the place very
thoroughly.

At a certain spot where Mary Hope had been fond of sitting on the rock
shelf with her straight little back against the Tooth's smooth side,
a splendid view of the Devil's Tooth ranch was to be had. The house
itself was hidden in a cottonwood grove that Belle had planted when
she was a bride, but the corrals, the pastures, the road up the Ridge
was plainly visible. And in the shallow crack in the rock was another
cigarette end, economically smoked down to a three-quarter-inch stub.

Lance returned by way of the shelf to the outcropping of rocks that
would leave no trace of his passing. He untied and mounted the roan
and circled the vicinity cautiously. Two hundred yards away, down the
slope and on a small level place where the brush grew thick, he found
where a horse had stood for hours. He looked at the hoofprints, turned
back and rode down the schoolhouse trail again, following the tracks
of the fagged black horse.

When another fifty yards would bring the basin in sight, Lance turned
off the trail and dismounted, tied the roan again and went forward
slowly, his eyes intent on the tops of the trees around Cottonwood
Spring. A rattler buzzed suddenly, and he stopped, looked to see where
the snake was coiled, saw it withdraw its mottled gray body from under
a rabbit weed and drag sinuously away, its ugly head lifted a little,
eyes watching him venomously. An unwritten law of the West he broke by
letting the snake go. Again he moved forward, from bush to bush, from
boulder to boulder. When all of the basin and the grove were revealed
to him, he stopped, removed his gray range hat and hung it on a
near-by bush. He took his small field glasses from his pocket, dusted
the lenses deliberately and, leaning forward across a rock with his
elbows steadied on the stone and the glasses to his eyes, he swept
foot by foot the grove.

He was some minutes in discovering a black horse well within the outer
fringe of the cottonwoods, switching mechanically at the flies and
mosquitoes that infested the place, and throwing his head impatiently
to his sid