* * * * *

Waring, riding in with the crew, found the ranch-house deserted and the pinto ponies dragging the shreds of a broken harness, grazing along the fence.  Waring sent a man to catch up the team.  Ramon cooked supper.  The men ate in silence.

After supper Waring changed his clothes, saddled Dex, and packed some food in the saddle-pockets.  “I am going out to look for Pat,” he told one of his men.  “If Waco shows up, keep him here till I get back.  Those horses didn’t get away from Pat.  Here’s a signed check.  Get what you need and keep on with the work.  You’re foreman till I get back.”

“If there’s anything doing—­” began the cowboy.

“I don’t know.  Some one rode in here to-day.  It was along about noon that Pat and Waco left.  The bread was baked.  I’d say they drove to town for grub; only Pat took his gun—­without the holster.  It looks bad to me.  If anything happens to me, just send for Lorry Adams at the Ranger Station.”

Waring rode out, looking for tracks.  His men watched him until he had disappeared behind a rise.  Bender, the new foreman, turned to his fellows.

“I’d hate to be the man that the boss is lookin’ for,” he said, shaking his head.

“Why, he’s lookin’ for Pat, ain’t he?” queried one of the men.

“That ain’t what I mean,” said the foreman.

* * * * *

The wind died down suddenly.  The sun, just above the horizon, glowed like a disk of burnished copper.  The wagon ruts were filled with fine sand.  Waring read the trail.  The buckboard had traveled briskly.  It had stopped at the line.  The tracks of the fretting ponies showed that clearly.  Alongside the tracks of the ponies were the half-hidden tracks of a single horse.  Waring glanced back at the sun, and put Dex to a lope.  He swung into the main road, his gaze following the half-obliterated trail of the single horseman.  Suddenly he reined up.  The horseman had angled away from the road and had ridden north across the open country.  He had not gone to Stacey.  Waring knew that the horseman had been riding hard.  Straight north from where Waring had stopped was the Starr Ranch.

He rode on, his heart heavy with a black premonition.  The glowing copper disk was now half-hidden by the western hills.

At the brink of the arroyo he dismounted.  He could see nothing distinctly in the gloom of its depths.  Stooping, he noted the wagon tracks as he worked on down.  His foot struck against something hard.  He fumbled and picked Pat’s gun from the sand.  Every chamber was loaded.

“He didn’t have a chance.”  Waring was startled by his own voice.  He thrust the gun in his waistband.  The twilight deepened rapidly.  Rocks and ridges in the arroyo assumed peculiar shapes like those of men crouching; men prone; men with heads up, listening, watching, waiting.  Yet Waring’s instinct for hidden danger told him that there was no living thing in the arroyo—­unless—­Suddenly he sprang forward and dropped to his knees beside a huddled shape near a boulder.