“Jack Merrill ain’t that kind,” he said; “I tell yer, I don’t like the looks of it.”
“Why not fire guns so that if he is in the vicinity he can hear them?” was Walt Phelps’ suggestion.
“Yep, and bring the whole hornets’ nest down on our ears, provided they are anywhar near,” grunted Coyote Pete. “No younker, we will have to think up a better way than that.”
“Would not the search party I suggested be the best plan?” put in the professor.
“Reckon it would,” agreed Coyote Pete; “what you kain’t find, look fur,—as the flea said to ther monkey.”
But nobody laughed, as they usually did, at Pete’s quaintly phrased observations. There was too much anxiety felt by them all over Jack’s unexplained absence.
“Shall we take the horses?” inquired Walt.
“Sartin, sure,” was the cow-puncher’s rejoinder, “don’t want ter leave ’em here for that letter writer and his pals to gobble up.”
So the stock was saddled and the pack burros loaded and “diamond hitched,” and the mournful and anxious little party got under way. It so chanced that their way led them to the little hill where Jack had stopped on the stolen horse and listened for sounds of the pursuit. Coyote’s sharp eyes at once spied the tracks, but naturally he could make nothing of them.
Suddenly Ralph Stetson, who had ridden a little in advance, gave a startled cry.
“What’s up now?” grunted Coyote Pete, spurring forward, followed by the others.
“Why, here’s a horse,—a dead horse, shot through the head, lying here,” was the unexpected reply.
“Well, Mr. Coyote, what do you make of it?” asked the professor, after Pete had carefully surveyed the ground in the vicinity.
“Dunno what ter make uv it yit,” snorted Pete. “Looks like ther’s something back of this, as the cat said when she looked in the mirror, and—wow!”
“What is it?” they chorused as they pressed about the spot where Coyote was pointing downward, an unusual expression of excitement on his ordinarily unemotional features.
“Yes, I see several footsteps,” said the professor, “but what have they——”
“Ter do with it? Everything. Them’s Jack Merrill’s footmarks or I lose my guess. And see here, this little wavy line,—a lariat’s dragged here. Oh, the varmints!”
“How do you construe all this?” asked the professor.