Page:Sheep Limit (1928).pdf/48

 view from the height had indicated, rather than revealed. Here he came across the first proof that Galloway's fence was not accepted passively by all whom it barred.

Somebody had cut the fence. The ground was marked here by a horse's tracks, seeming to indicate to Rawlins' eye, not unpracticed in such things, that the rider had leaned from the saddle to snip the wires. The trespasser had ridden into the forbidden lands with a bound, deep hoof-prints showing where the animal had leaped under the spur. Now he was returning after his defiant excursion, the hill his landmark, heading for the cut in the fence like a bee to its tree.

Rawlins stood grinning beside the gap in the wires, taking a great satisfaction in the sight, feeling friendly and partisan toward the daring fellow who had made the breach to save himself a ride of thirty-five or forty miles. He would wait there until the rider arrived, pounding headlong for the hole in the fence, and give him greeting, with a word of endorsement, as he passed.

At that moment the interest of the situation began to increase. Somebody else was coming along inside the fence, descending the flank of the hill which Rawlins had come down. Rawlins could not see this rider, the bushy growth being high and thick along there, but he could hear the horse picking its way carefully down the steep slope, the rustle of its passing through the bushes, the noise of dislodged, stones. Easy enough to piece out the shaping comedy, or tragedy, or what