No, there was not a shadow of a place where man might be concealed and that scent could be nothing but a snare and an illusion.  To be sure there were other ways hardly less convenient to the waterhole, but why should he be turned from the easiest way day after day because of this unbodied warning?  He started down the slope.

It brought the grey after him, neighing wildly, but though she circled around him at full speed time after time, he would not pause, and when she attempted to block him he raised his head and pushed her away with the resistless urge of breast and shoulders.  At that she attempted no more forceful persuasion but fell in behind him, still pausing from time to time to send her mournfully persuasive whinny after the obdurate leader until even the bays, usually so blindly docile, grew alarmed and fell back to a huddled grouping half way between Alcatraz and the trailing grey.  It touched his pride sharply, this division of their trust.  Twice he slackened his lope and called to them to hasten and when they responded with only a faint-hearted trot he was forced to mask his impatience.  Coming to a walk he cropped imaginary grasses from time to time and so induced the others to draw nearer.

It was slow work going down the hollow in this way, and hot work, too, but though he often glanced up yearningly towards the wooded hills beyond, he kept to his pretense of carelessness and so managed to hold the mares in a close-bunched group behind him.  In the meantime the scent grew stronger, closer to the ground on that east wind.  Time and again he raised his head and stared earnestly, but it was impossible for any living creature to stalk within hundreds of yards of him without being seen—­whereas that scent spoke of one almost within leaping distance.  Once it seemed to his excited imagination—­as he lowered his head to sniff at a tuft of dead grasses—­that he heard the sound of human breathing.

He snorted the foolish thought into nothingness and after a glance back to make sure that his companions followed, he resolutely stepped out into the very heart of the man-scent.  So closely was that phantom located by the sense of smell that it seemed to Alcatraz he could see the exact spot on the hillside behind a small rock where the ghost must lie.  Yet he disdained to flee from empty air and for all his beating heart he raised his head and walked sedately on.  The danger spot was drifting past on his left when a squeal of fear from the wild grey far in the rear made Alcatraz leap sidewise with catlike suddenness.

Growing by magic from the sand behind the little rock the head and shoulders of a man appeared, his shadow pouring down the sun-whitened slope.  In his hand he swung a rapidly lengthening loop of rope and as his arm went back it knocked off the fellow’s hat and exposed a shock of red hair.  So much Alcatraz saw while the paralysis of fear locked every joint for the tenth part of a second, and deeply as