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 sustained ten thousand; often a lone grazer, which lifted its head with a start, trotted away and stopped to stare again. But not a man; not a rider galloping over those flattened, grass-topped hills. Which, he thought, was just as well.

Simpson followed this road until noon before coming to the river crossing toward which it had been leading all the way. More than once he had ridden aside into the thick brush on a false alarm of somebody coming, somebody following; twice he had drawn aside at the unmistakable approach of wagons, both coming from the east. One of these was driven by a negro, his Indian wife on the seat beside him, a green-bordered red blanket over her greasy head; the other by a slinking white man who carried two live hogs as passengers. Where he could have got them, where he might be taking them in that empty country, was a thing to speculate upon but not to answer.

After crossing the river the country rose abruptly, the woods thinned out to straggling small trees which in turn blended down to bushes and open prairie. The road continued its easterly course over this grassy plateau, the tracks of the stolen horses still plainly marked in it, although it was hard and dry here, and the animals had spread to the bordering sod.

About two miles beyond the ford, on the bank of a little stream such as is called a spring branch in that country, Simpson came upon a house. The hoofprints which he had been following so hotly told him it was the end of his trail.

There were trees in the dip which made the nook for this homestead, and a line of them following the brook in