Crawford had to read sign on every foot of the way.

"Chances are they didn't leave the ditch till they heard the water
comin'," the cattleman said. "These fellows knew their business, and they
were playin' safe."

Dave pulled up. He went down on his knees and studied the ground, then
jumped down into the ditch and examined the bank.

"Here's where they got out," he announced.

Thomas pressed forward. With one outstretched hand the young man held him
back.

"Just a minute. I want Mr. Crawford to see this before it's touched."

The old cattleman examined the side of the canal. The clay showed where a
sharp hoof had reached for a footing, missed, and pawed down the bank.
Higher up was the faint mark of a shoe on the loose rubble at the edge.

"Looks like," he assented.

Study of the ground above showed the trail of two horses striking off at
a right angle from the ditch toward the mouth of a box canon about a mile
distant. The horses were both larger than broncos. One of them was shod.
One of the front shoes, badly worn, was broken and part of it gone on the
left side. The riders were taking no pains apparently to hide their
course. No doubt they relied on the full ditch to blot out pursuit.

The trail led through the canon, over a divide beyond, and down into a
small grassy valley.

At the summit Crawford gave strict orders. "No talkin', Mr. Thomas. This
is serious business now. We're in enemy country and have got to soft-foot
it."

The foothills were bristling with chaparral. Behind any scrub oak or
cedar, under cover of an aspen thicket or even of a clump of gray sage,
an enemy with murder in his heart might be lurking. Here an ambush was
much more likely than in the sun-scorched plain they had left.

The three men left the footpath where it dipped down into the park and
followed the rim to the left, passing through a heavy growth of manzanita
to a bare hill dotted with scrubby sage, at the other side of which was
a small gulch of aspens straggling down into the valley

Martha Finley (1828 - 1909) was a teacher and author of numerous works, the most well known being the 28 volume Elsie Dinsmore series which was published over a span of 38 years. The daughter of Presbyterian minister Dr. James Brown Finley and his wife and cousin Maria Theresa Brown Finley, she was born on April 26th, 1828 in Chillicothe, Ohio. Finley wrote many of her books under the psodonym Martha Farquharson. She died in 1909 in Elkton, Maryland, where she moved in 1876.

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