When the Ranger and the artist were riding down the canyon to the ranch, the officer said, “There’s a big chance that Myra is right, Aaron.  After all, she knows Sibyl better than any of us, and I can see that she’s got a fairly clear idea of what sent the child off like this.  As it stands now, the girl may be just wandering around.  If she is, the boys will pick her up before many hours.  She may have met with some accident.  If that’s it, we’ll know before long.  She may have been—­I tell you, Aaron, it’s that automobile acting the way it did that I can’t get around.”

The searchers were all at the ranch when the two men arrived.  No one had a word of encouragement to report.  A messenger from the Sheriff brought no light on the mystery of the automobile.  The two men who had followed the pipe-line trail had found nothing.  A few times, they thought they had signs that a horse had been over the trail the night before, but there was no certainty; and after the pipe-line reached the floor of the canyon there was absolutely nothing.  Jack Carleton was back from the Galena Valley neighborhood, and, with him, was the horseman who had gone down the canyon the evening before.  The man was known to all.  He had been hunting, and was on his way home when Henry Carleton and the Ranger had seen him.  He had come, now, to help in the search.

Picking a half dozen men from the party, Brian Oakley sent them to spend the night riding the higher trails and fire-breaks, watching for camp-fire lights.  The others, he ordered to rest, in readiness to take up the search at daylight, should the night riders come in without results.

Aaron King, exhausted, physically and mentally, sank into a stupor that could scarcely be called sleep.

At daybreak, the riders who had been all night on the higher trails and fire-breaks, searching the darkness for the possible gleam of a camp-fire’s light, came in.

All that day—­Wednesday—­the mountain horsemen rode, widening the area of their search under the direction of the Ranger.  From sundown until long after dark, they came straggling wearily back; their horses nearly exhausted, the riders beginning to fear that Sibyl would never be found alive.  There was no further word from the Sheriff at Fairlands.

Then suddenly, out of the blackness of the night, a rider from the other side of the Galenas arrived with the word that the girl’s horse had been found.  The animal was grazing in the neighborhood of Pine Glen.  The saddle and the horse’s sides were stained with dirt, as if the animal had fallen.  The bridle-reins had been broken.  The horse might have rolled on the saddle; he might have stepped on the bridle-reins; he might have fallen and left his rider lying senseless.  In any case, they reasoned, the animal would scarcely have found his way over the Galena range after he had been left to wander at will.