times, so he pulled down again to a fast walk. For a few minutes he
did not hear the bell at all, and when he did it was not where he had
expected to hear it, but away off to one side. So he had gained nothing
save in anger and uneasiness.

There was no use going back to camp and rousing the boys, for he was now
a mile or so away; and they would be afoot, since their custom was to
keep but one horse saddled. When he went in to call the next guard he
would be expected to bring that man's horse back with him, and would
turn his own loose before he went to sleep. Certainly there was nothing
to be gained by rousing the camp.

He did not suspect the trick being played upon him, though he did wonder
if someone was leading the horses away. Still, in that case whoever
did it would surely have sense enough to muffle the bell. Besides, it
sounded exactly like a horse feeding and moving away at random--which,
to those familiar with the sound, can never be mistaken for the tinkle
of an animal traveling steadily to some definite point.

It was an extremely puzzled young man who rode and rode that night in
pursuit of that evasive, nagging, altogether maddening tinkle. Always
just over the next little rise he would hear it, or down in the next
little draw; never close enough for him to discover the trick; never far
enough away for him to give up the chase. The stars he had been watching
in camp swam through the purple immensity above him and slid behind
the skyline. Other stars as brilliant appeared and began their slow,
swimming journey. Pink rode, and stopped to listen, and rode on again
until it seemed to him that he must be dreaming some terribly realistic
nightmare.

He was sitting on his horse on a lava-crusted ridge, straining bloodshot
eyes into the mesa that stretched dimly before him, when dawn came
streaking the sky with blood orange and purple and crimson. The stars
were quenched in that flood of light; and Pink, looking now with clearer
vision, saw that there was no living thing in sight save a coyote
trotting home from his night's hunting. He turned short around and,
getting his bearings from his memory of certain stars and from the sun
that was peering at him from the top of a bare peak, and from that sense
of direction which becomes second nature to a man who had lived long on
the range, started for camp with his ill news.

CHAPTER XIV. ONE PUT OVER ON THE BUNCH

"Sounds to me," volunteered the irrepressible