In these days of gasoline travel one need not be greatly surprised to meet a car, or see the traces of one, in almost any out-of-the-way spot where four wheels can possibly be made to travel.  On the other hand, the man at the wheel is not likely to send his machine over rocks and through sand where the traction is poor, and across dry ditches and among greasewood, just for the fun of driving.  There is sport with rod or gun to lure, or there is necessity to impel, or the driver is lost and wants to reach some point that looks familiar, or he is trying to dodge something or somebody.

Starr sat beside that grease spot in the sand and smoked a cigarette and studied the surrounding hills and tried to decide what had brought the car up here.  Not sport, unless it was hunting of jack rabbits; and there were more jack rabbits out on the flat than here.  There was no trout stream near, at least, none that was not more accessible from another point.  To be sure, some tenderfoot tourist might have been told some yarn that brought him up here on a wild-goose chase.  You can, thought Starr, expect any fool thing of a tourist.  He remembered running across one that was trying between trains to walk across the mesa from Albuquerque to the Sandia mountains.  It had been hard to convince that particular specimen that he was not within a mile or so of his goal, and that he would do well to reach the mountains in another three hours or so of steady walking.  Compared with that, driving a car up this arroyo did not look so foolish.

But tourists did not invade this particular locality with their overconfident inexperience, and Starr did not give that explanation much serious thought.  Instead he followed on up the narrowed gulch to higher ground, to see where men would be most likely to go from there.  At the top he looked out upon further knobs and hollows and aimless depressions, just as he had expected.  Half a mile or so away there drifted a thin spiral of smoke, from the kitchen stove of the Senora Medina, he guessed.  But there was no other sign of human life anywhere within the radius of many miles, or, to be explicit, within the field of Starr’s vision.

He looked for footprints, but in a few minutes he gave up in disgust.  The ridge he stood on stretched for miles, up beyond Medina’s home ranch and down past the Sommers’ ranch, five or six miles nearer town, and on to the railroad.  And it was a rocky ridge if ever there was one; granite outcroppings, cobblestones, boulders, anything but good loose soil where tracks might be followed.  A dog might have followed a trail there before the scent was baked out by blistering heat; but Starr certainly could not.

He stood looking across to where the smoke curled up into the intense Blue of the sky.  If a man wanted to reach the Medina ranch by the most obscure route, he thought, this would be one way to get there.  He went back to where the automobile had stood and searched there for some sign of those who had ridden this far.  But if any man left that machine, he had stepped from the running board upon rock, and so had left no telltale print of his foot.