Page:Clarence Mulford - Man from Bar-20.djvu/312

 The Man from Bar-20 bowlders which sheltered him, determined to prove or disprove the haunting subconscious sense. It had become maddening, a ghost he simply had to lay.

Realizing that the moving object is the more readily seen, Luke moved slowly and with no regard for dignity; and he proceeded, an inch at a time, upon his lean, old stomach. Nothing was too small or insignificant to escape his notice, for his eyes, close to the ground, first took in the entire field of vision with one quick, sweeping glance, and then, beginning with the more distant objects, examined everything in sight as though he had lost something of great value and of size infinitesimal. Another few inches of slow, laborious progress, and another searching scrutiny, his ears as busy as his eyes. In half an hour he had covered ten feet, and at the end of an hour he had made it twenty. And then, as he glanced around to obtain a general and preliminary view of a new vista, his eyes passed over a little patch of sand, and instantly flashed back to it, regarding it with an unwinking intentness.

He hitched forward again, more rapidly, and gained three feet before he stopped to peer about him. At last he came to the sand patch, which lay between a bowlder and a clump of dry, dead, and rustly brush; which accounted for its having a story to tell. It was the only way a cautious man could have proceeded; and the print of the heel of a hand and the five little 300