mers sticking in his mind with the unpleasant
flavor of mystery.

He mounted Rabbit again and made a detour of several miles so that he
might come up on the ridge behind Medina's without running any risk of
crossing the trail of the men he wanted to watch. About two o'clock he
stopped at a shallow, brackish stream and let Rabbit rest and feed for an
hour while Starr himself climbed another rocky pinnacle and scanned the
country between there and Medina's.

The gate that let one off the main road and into the winding trail which
led to the house stood out in plain view at the mouth of a shallow draw.
This was not the trail which led out from the home ranch toward San
Bonito, where Starr had been going when he saw the track of the
mysterious automobile, but the trail one would take in going from
Medina's to Malpais. The ranch house itself stood back where the draw
narrowed, but the yellow-brown trail ribboned back from the gate in
plain view.

Here again Starr was fated to get a glimpse and no more. He focussed his
glasses on the main road first; picked up the Medina branch to the gate,
followed the trail on up the draw, and again he picked up a man riding a
bay horse. And just as he was adjusting his lenses for a sharper clarity
of vision, the horse trotted around a bend and disappeared from sight.

Starr swore, but that did not bring the man back down the trail. Starr
was not at all sure that this was the same man he had seen in the draw,
and he was not sure that either was the man who had shot at him. But
roosting on that heat-blistered pinnacle swearing about the things he
didn't know struck him as a profitless performance, so he climbed down,
got into the saddle again, and rode on.

He reached the granite ridge back of Medina's about four o'clock in the
afternoon. He was tired, for he had been going since daylight, and for a
part of the time at least he had been going on foot, climbing the steep,
rocky sides of peaks for the sake of what he might see from the top, and
then climbing down again for sake of what some one else might see if he
stayed too long. His high-heeled riding boots that Helen May so greatly
admired were very good-looking and very comfortable when he had them
stuck into stirrups to the heel. But they had never been built for
walking. Therefore his feet ached abominably. And there was the heat, the
searing, dry heat of midsummer in the desert country. He was dog tired,
and he was depressed becau