Leaving the mountainside, he struck at a trot across a tableland.  Some mysterious instinct enabled him to guide the pony without glancing once at the ground; for Sinclair, with his head high, was now carefully examining the house before him.  Twice a cluster of trees obscured it, and each time, as it came again more closely in view, the eye of Riley Sinclair brightened with certainty.  At length, nodding slightly to express his conviction, he sent the pony into the shelter of a little grove overlooking the house.  From this shelter, still giving half his attention to his objective, he ran swiftly over his weapons.  The pair of long pistols came smoothly into his hands, to be weighed nicely, and have their cylinders spun.  Then the rifle came out of its case, and its magazine was looked to thoroughly before it was returned.

This done, the rider seemed in no peculiar haste to go on.  He merely pushed the horse into a position from which he commanded all the environs of the house; then he sat still as a hawk hovering in a windless sky.

Presently the door of the little shack opened, and two men came out and walked down the path toward the road, talking earnestly.  One was as tall as Riley Sinclair, but heavier; the other was a little, slight man.  He went to a sleepy pony at the end of the path and slowly gathered the reins.  Plainly he was troubled, and apparently it was the big man who had troubled him.  For now he turned and cast out his hand toward the other, speaking rapidly, in the manner of one making a last appeal.  Only the murmur of that voice drifted up to Riley Sinclair, but the loud laughter of the big man drove clearly to him.  The smaller of the two mounted and rode away with dejected head, while the other remained with arms folded, looking after him.

He seemed to be chuckling at the little man, and indeed there was cause, for Riley had never seen a rider so completely out of place in a saddle.  When the pony presently broke into a soft lope it caused the elbows of the little man to flop like wings.  Like a great clumsy bird he winged his way out of view beyond the edge of the hilltop.

The big man continued to stand with his arms folded, looking in the direction in which the other had disappeared; he was still shaking with mirth.  When he eventually turned, Riley Sinclair was riding down on him at a sharp gallop.  Strangers do not pass ungreeted in the mountain desert.  There was a wave of the arm to Riley, and he responded by bringing his horse to a trot, then reining in close to the big man.  At close hand he seemed even larger than from a distance, a burly figure with ludicrously inadequate support from the narrow-heeled riding boots.  He looked sharply at Riley Sinclair, but his first speech was for the hard-ridden pony.

“You been putting your hoss through a grind, I see, stranger.”

The mustang had slumped into a position of rest, his sides heaving.