as soon as scott was dressed in the morning he hurried out to see if he could find any tell-tale tracks of the man who had shot at him the night before. much to his surprise he found the distinct prints of a horse’s hoofs. he had taken it for granted the night before that it was one of the disgruntled sheep herders, but none of them had horses. then he thought of the horseman who had tried to steal jed a few days before. he ran anxiously to the corral and was soon reassured by a cheerful nicker in response to his whistle.
all through breakfast he turned over in his mind the problem of the entrance of the four thousand sheep, the warning shot fired by the mysterious stranger the night before and the prolonged absence of heth. he could not solve any of them to his entire satisfaction, but he came to several important conclusions. he decided that it would be necessary to watch the sheep herders who were in the forest just as closely now to keep them from running the extras off of the forest before the recount, as he would have to do to keep them from bringing other extras on. he also decided to see baxter and get his co?peration.
he could ’phone baxter and get him to meet him half way but one could never tell who might be listening in on those party lines and he wanted to keep his business pretty much to himself for the next few days. and so it was that he saddled jed and rode away to take a chance on finding baxter, and he thereby greatly disappointed an impatient and anxious gentleman who had been hanging onto a receiver for over an hour hoping to discover his whereabouts.
jed was feeling very lively that morning and made the gravel fly along the old ridge trail, across the broad valley and up the long slope to the patrolman’s cabin on the next district. he was fortunate in catching baxter just as he was starting out for the day.
“hello, there,” baxter called gayly, “something doing so soon after sun up?”
“this something started long before the sun got up,” scott replied. “i’ve started something over my way that looks as though it would keep me pretty busy for a while, and i want to know whether you can help me to carry it through?”
“you bet i can,” baxter cried eagerly, “i’m pining away for lack of excitement. what is it?”
“well, to begin at the beginning, somebody beat me to the report on those sheep. i had not much more than gotten home the other day after i left you than the super called me up, said that dawson had told him that the boys had run a bunch of sheep in on me up the ca?ons in the valley cliffs, and called me down hard for not preventing it.”
“up the ca?ons,” baxter exclaimed, “i never examined them, but i never supposed that sheep could get up there.”
“i told him what i had found out—did not mention you—and he recommended a recount. he said dawson was on his way home, but he would take it up with him as soon as he had had time to get there.
“in the morning i called dawson. he told me what he had heard and told me to order a recount monday morning if i was sure of my estimates, but to be careful or i would get stung.”
“i told you dawson would be all right,” baxter interrupted.
“yes,” scott admitted, “he was pretty good about it. well, i took some satisfaction in ordering a recount and thought while i was down that way i would have a look at those ca?ons. not a sheep had been up them, and what’s more, no sheep ever can get up them. there is a clear drop of three hundred feet at the bottom of each one.”
“that’s what i thought,” commented baxter, “but if they did not come up there where did they come from?”
“that’s what i wanted to know. so i started out right there at the valley cliffs and rode clear around my district looking for sheep tracks. not a single sheep has come into that district except at the chute.”
baxter gave a long whistle, “what does heth say to that?”
“he has not been at the cabin since the count. at least i have not see him.”
“looks as though he might be able to explain it,” baxter drawled. “i want to see that man. if he is a sheep man i must have seen him somewhere, but i can’t recall the name at all. what is your plan now? where do i come in?”
“well, you see i have it figured out this way. i have ordered them up for a recount monday and they can’t get away from that. probably their next move will be to try to prove that the estimates were wrong and that they did not have any extra sheep.”
“don’t let that worry you old man,” baxter assured him, “the estimates i made may not be accurate but they are conservative, and i’d bet my last dollar that every band on your district is padded.”
“i am not worrying about your estimates. i am perfectly willing to trust them. what i am afraid of is that they will drive off the extras between now and monday morning. then where would i be on the recount?”
“by george,” baxter exclaimed, slapping his thigh, “i had not thought of that. that is certainly what they will try to do.”
“that is where you come in,” scott said. “i wanted to see if you would patrol the line here and see that they do not run them over your territory temporarily. they might try that with the idea of bringing them back into my district when the recount is over. they probably figure that i would not dare to order a second recount after they had proved that i was wrong on the first.”
“you bet i will patrol that line,” baxter exclaimed eagerly, “both for your sake and mine. i don’t want those beggars to slip anything over on me. i have a guard here who is a dandy and the two of us can keep that line tighter than beeswax.”
“are the herders in your district in with that bunch?” scott asked absently.
“i should say not,” baxter replied contemptuously, “they are a different sort. they come from the other side of the mountains, you know, and hate jed clark’s gang.”
“that’s what i thought,” scott said. “how would it do to tell them that you have heard that some of jed’s herders are going to try to sneak some sheep over here and steal some of their grass?”
“great,” baxter exclaimed. “you are some diplomatist, burton. i’ll tell them and if those fellows do try to come over you want to be around and see the fight.”
“then i’ll count on you for this end,” scott explained, “and that will leave me free to watch the chute and keep an eye on them occasionally to see that they do not sneak up over the ridge. that will help me out in great shape. thanks.”
scott turned jed toward home and baxter rode away to warn his herders to be on the lookout for possible interlopers.
scott thought it safest to go back to the chute before he tried to hunt up the bands. there was nothing to prevent them from driving the sheep back through the chute, if they could get them there without being seen, and it would be difficult if not impossible to prove that they had ever been on the forest at all. the thought made him nervous and he let jed swing along over the ridge at a lively pace. he stopped at the cabin for a moment but there was as yet no sign of heth.
“fine help for me, that fellow is,” scott growled as he rode on down to the chute. “mr. ramsey said that he knew all there was to know about sheep. probably knows all about that extra four thousand, too.”
he searched the ground around the chute anxiously. there were no new tracks. scott heaved a sigh of relief. he felt sure that they would not get by baxter on the west, they had not crossed the ridge trail to the north, they had not been to the chute on the east, and the valley cliffs were on the south. they must be inside of that quadrangle where they had been the day before, but scott thought he would drop around that way to see which way they were moving.
he was starting out once more when a snort from jed attracted his attention to some hoof prints. they were fresh and showed very distinctly in the dusty sheep track. two horsemen had ridden that way. instead of following the regular trail up past the cabin to the ridge they had turned westward soon after passing the chute and skirted the edge of the valley cliffs. scott followed the tracks a little way along the sheep trail but soon lost them when they turned off into the brush. he was not interested in horse tracks, it was sheep that he was looking for.
but he had not gone very far on his way when he pulled up suddenly, hesitated an instant and then rode back to the chute. he dismounted to examine the hoof prints more carefully and straightened up with a puzzled look on his frowning face. heth’s horse had lost a shoe from its near front foot and the tracks in the dust showed the same missing shoe.
“i wonder what he is doing skylarking around this district and avoiding the cabin?” he mused to himself. “must be that he does not like my company. well, i am starting out in his direction and may have to force myself on him whether he likes it or not.”
he rode slowly forward again, thinking over the question which he was determined to make heth answer when he finally got him cornered. he followed the dusty sheep trail and kept a sharp lookout both to the south toward the valley cliffs and on the ground, for he wanted to know whether the horsemen kept to the rim of the cliffs or turned north to the ridge trail.
before long his careful watch was rewarded. the plain hoof prints of a horse crossing the sheep trail from south to north were distinctly registered in the dust. he searched the trail for some distance but there was only the one horse and it was not the one with the missing shoe. the prints had been made only a short time before. in one place where the rider had apparently used the spur the hoofs had gouged deeply into the ground and the bottoms of those tracks had not completely dried out.
“that must mean that heth is going to stay down there on the bench,” scott thought and he left the sheep trail which was turning slightly to the northwest, so he could keep a better watch on the rim of the cliffs. the forest was open here and by following along the face of the lower slope he could keep a good lookout on the flat bench below. any one passing that way would be in plain view while he himself would be partially concealed by the forest.
“maybe i can get a job with a detective agency when i get through with this gum shoe business here,” scott growled to himself. “first you try to keep a man from getting extra sheep onto your district and then you try harder to keep him from getting them off.”
it was rather good fun just the same. it was funny, too, to think of baxter, his guard, himself, and all the sheep herders in the other district tearing madly around the forest to prevent other herders from driving their sheep off of a highly desirable piece of range. he was getting very curious to see just what their scheme would be and how far they would go to hide those extra sheep. had he known how they came to be on there he would have known that they would go the limit and that a man’s life would not be considered too high a price.
scott was beginning to get a little worried. he had passed half way across his district, crossed two of the areas allotted to two of the bands and had not yet seen a sheep. it looked as though they must be moving to the southwest and he wondered if they could possibly slip by baxter along the rim of the valley cliffs. then he thought of the look on baxter’s face when he promised his help, and grinned. “it would be easier for them to hide the sheep in the tree tops,” he laughed.
but if that was not the plan, what could it be? could there possibly be a trail down over those cliffs? it hardly seemed possible that he could have missed it. and yet the scene which unfolded from behind the next shoulder of the slope filled him with wonder and apprehension.
there were the sheep. they looked to scott like all the sheep in the world. he had thought that his experience with baxter had taught him something about estimating sheep, but he could not tell anything about a bunch like that. all the bands in the district must have been driven together there. twelve thousand sheep in one big band. it was a great sight. there were no herders in sight but the dogs were holding the sheep closely bunched. the innumerable bleatings blended into a mighty raucous chorus unlike anything that scott had ever heard. the band as a whole was stationary but all through it there were little whirlpools of local unrest where small groups were milling around nervously. every now and then a leader with a few followers would break away from the bunch, but they never went far before they either lost their nerve and dashed wildly back to join the main band or were driven back by the keen-eyed dogs.
there they were, all right, but what under the sun were they doing there? and where were the herders?
the bands were grouped around the heads of two of the largest ca?ons in the valley cliffs, but scott remembered very distinctly examining them both carefully. he knew that there was no possibility of getting sheep down through them. they both ended in a sheer drop of three hundred feet to the valley below. he had crawled to the very brink of the cliff and inspected it with great care. he had tried to imagine a man climbing it and had come to the conclusion that it could not be done.
scott noted a tiny wisp of smoke floating up from the mouth of one of the ca?ons.
“there is certainly something doing down there,” scott said to himself, “and both my official duty and my own personal curiosity demand an investigation of it.”
he dismounted, left jed in a clump of timber, and walked slowly down toward the ca?on.
