“Won’t do,” said Billinger, spitting on his match before tossing it among the grass.  “It’s ten miles across this wire-dip, and we won’t make it until night—­it we make it at all.  I’ve got an idea.  You’re a better trailer than I am, so you follow this through.  I’ll ride on and see if I can pick up the trail somewhere in the edge of the clean prairie.  What do you say?”

“Good!” said Philip.  “I believe you can do it.”

Billinger leaped into his saddle and was off at a gallop.  Philip was almost eagerly anxious for this opportunity, and scarcely had the other gone when he drew the linen handkerchief and the crumpled lock of hair from his pocket and held them in his hand as he looked after the agent.  Then, slowly, he raised the handkerchief to his face.  For a full minute he stood with the dainty fabric pressed to his lips and nose.  Back there—­when he had first held the handkerchief—­he thought that he imagined.  But now he was sure.  Faintly the bit of soiled fabric breathed to him the sweet scent of hyacinth.  His eyes shone in an eager bloodshot glare as he watched Billinger disappear over a roll in the prairie a mile away.

“Making a fool of yourself again,” he muttered, again winding the golden hair about his fingers.  “There are other women in the world who use hyacinth besides her.  And there are other women with red-gold hair—­and pretty, pretty as Billinger says she was, aren’t there?”

He laughed, but there was something uneasy and unnatural in the laugh.  In spite of his efforts to argue the absurdity of his thoughts, he could feel that he was trembling in every nerve of his body.  And twice—­three times he held the handkerchief to his face before he reached the rise in the prairie over which Billinger had disappeared.  The agent had been gone an hour when the trail of the outlaws brought him to the knoll.  From the top of it Philip looked over the prairie to the North.

A horseman was galloping toward him.  He knew that it was Billinger, and stood up in his stirrups so that the other would see him.  Half a mile away the agent stopped and Philip could see him signaling frantically with both arms.  Five minutes later Philip rode up to him.  Billinger’s horse was half-winded, and in Billinger’s face there were tense lines of excitement.

“There’s some one out on the prairie,” he called, as Philip reined in.  “I couldn’t make out a horse, but there’s a man in the trail beyond the second ridge.  I believe they’ve stopped to water their horses and feed at a little lake just this side of the rough country.”

Billinger had loosened his carbine, and was examining the breech.  He glanced anxiously at Philip’s empty saddle-straps.

“It’ll be long-range shooting, if they’ve got guns,” he said.  “Sorry I couldn’t find a gun for you.”

Philip drew one of his two long-barreled service revolvers and set his lips in a grim and reassuring smile as he followed the bobbing head of a coyote some distance away.