Page:Allan Dunn--Dead Man's Gold.djvu/256

242 have got a special hankerin' to round him up I don't mind accommodating you. They's a couple of likely cayuses in thet bunch. I'll jest sw'ar ye in as deputies. Hold up yore right hands. Seein' the circumstances, I might add thet you can bring him or leave him, so long's you finish the job. Them's my instructions. Sabe?"

Stone and Larkin were in the saddle before he had finished. Their mounts seemed in good condition and they did not spare them although they let them wash out their mouths when they reached Tonto Creek. The trail was plain where Healy had put his horse through the stream and turned it west, down cañon. A few spots of blood soon disappeared. Apparently the horse was less hurt than the sheriff had thought.

The tracks led past Stone Men Cañon, past Promontory Butte, under the cliffs of the chalcedony plateau. Then they saw him, his horse labouring gallantly at the head of a steep gulch though not the same one by which they had once descended. Before they could fire he had disappeared. He was making his way toward Miami, a desperate undertaking without forage, food and, possibly, water.

Their own mounts, desert-bred and hardened, scrambled up the acclivity like goats. Larkin was no accomplished horseman but he stuck like a burr to mane and saddle, or to pommel and cantle.

They discovered that, by luck or information, Healy had struck the plateau at its narrowest, where the desert eddied in on the rock. If he knew that