“She likes you fine—­my mother,” Estan observed, as the two sauntered to the corral where Rabbit was stowing away as much secate as he could against future hunger.  “Sometimes you come and stay longer.  We not see so many peoples here.  Nobody likes to cross desert when she’s hot like this.  Too bad you must go now.”

Starr agreed with him and talked the usual small talk of the desert Places while he placed the saddle on Rabbit’s still sweaty back.  He went away down the rocky trail with the sun shining full on his right cheek, and was presently swallowed up by the blank immensity of the land that looked level as a floor from a distance, but which was a network of small ridges and shallow draws and “dry washes” when one came to ride over it.

The trail was narrow and had many inconsequential twists and turns in it, as though the first man to travel that way had gone blind or dizzy and could not hold a straight line across the level.  When an automobile, for instance, traveled that road, it was with many skiddings in the sand on the turns, which it must take circumspectly if the driver did not care for the rocky, uneven floor of the desert itself.

Just lately some one had actually preferred to make his own trail, if tracks told anything.  Within half a mile of the Medina rancho Starr saw where an automobile had swerved sharply off the trail and had taken to the hard-packed sand of a dry arroyo that meandered barrenly off to the southeast.  He turned and examined the trail over which he had traveled, saw that it offered no more discouragement to an automobile than any other bit of trail in that part of the country, and with another glance at the yellow ribbon of road before him, he also swerved to the southeast.

For a mile the machine had labored, twisting this way and that to avoid rocky patches or deep cuts where the spring freshets had dug out the looser soil.  So far as Starr could discover there was nothing to bring a machine up here.  The arroyo was as thousands of other arroyos in that country.  The sides sloped up steeply, or were worn into perpendicular banks.  It led nowhere in particular; it was not a short cut to any place that he knew of.  The trail to Medina’s ranch was shorter and smoother, supposing Medina’s ranch were the objective point of the trip.

Starr could not see any sense in it, and that is why he followed the tortuous track to where the machine had stopped.  That it had stood there for some time he knew by the amount of oil that had leaked down into the sand.  He did not know for certain, since he did not know the oil-leaking habits of that particular car, but he guessed that it had stood there for a couple of hours at least before the driver had backed and turned around to retrace his way to the trail.