must find him--they
must.

The third day, Miss Allen put up a lunch, told her three claim partners
that she should not come back until night unless that poor child was
found, and that they need not look for her before dark and set out with
the twinkle all gone from her humorous brown eyes and her mouth very
determined.

She met Pink and the Native Son and was struck with the change which two
days of killing anxiety had made in them. True, they had not slept for
forty-eight hours, except an hour or two after they had been forced to
stop and eat. True, they had not eaten except in snatches. But it was
not that alone which made their faces look haggard and old and haunted.
They, too, were thinking of Lost Child Creek and How it had gotten its
name.

Miss Allen gleaned a little information from them regarding the general
whereabouts of the various searching parties. And then, having learned
that the foothills of the mountains were being searched minutely because
the Kid might have taken a notion to visit Meeker's; and that the
country around Wolf Butte was being searched, because he had once told
Big Medicine that when he got bigger and his dad would let him, he was
going over there and kill wolves to make Doctor Dell some rugs: and that
the country toward the river was being searched because the Kid always
wanted to see where the Happy Family drove the sheep to, that time
when Happy Jack got shot under the arm; that all the places the Kid had
seemed most interested in were being searched minutely--if it could be
possible to; search minutely a country the size of that! Having learned
all that, Miss Allen struck off by herself, straight down into the
Badlands where nobody seemed to have done much searching.

The reason for that was, that the Happy Family had come out of the
breaks on the day that the Kid was lost. They had not ridden together,
but in twos and threes because they drove out several small bunches of
cattle that they had gleaned, to a common centre in One Man Coulee. They
had traveled by the most feasible routes through that rough country, and
they had seen no sign of the Kid or any other rider.

They did not believe that he had come over that far, or even in that
direction; because a horseman would almost certainly have been sighted
by some of them in crossing a ridge somewhere.

It never occurred to anyone that the Kid might go down Flying U Creek
and so into the breaks and the Badlands. Flying U Creek