Rabbit lifted his head again, perking his ears forward toward a new sound that had nothing weird or mysterious about it; a sound that was essentially earthly, material, modern, the distant purr of a high-powered automobile on the trail away to their right.  Starr turned his face that way, listening as the horse listened.  It seemed to Helen May as though he had become again earthy and material and modern, with the desert love song but the fading memory of a dream.  He listened, and she received the impression that something more than idle curiosity held him intent upon the sound.

The purring persisted, lessened, grew louder again.  Starr still looked that way, listening intently.  The machine swept nearer, so that the clear night air carried the sounds distinctly to where they stood.  Starr even caught the humming of the rear gears and knew that only now and then does a machine have that peculiar, droning hum; Starr studied it, tried to impress the sound upon his memory.

The trail looped around the head of a sandy draw and wound over the crest of a low ridge before it straightened out for a three-mile level run in the direction of San Bonito, miles away.  In walking, Starr had cut straight across that gully and the loop, so that they had crossed the trail twice in their journey thus far, and were still within half a mile of the head of the loop.  They should have been able to see the lights, or at least the reflection of them on the ridge when they came to the draw.  But there was no bright path on sky or earth.

They heard the car ease down the hill, heard the grind of the gears as the driver shifted to the intermediate for the climb that came after.  They heard the chug of the engine taking the steep grade.  Then they should have caught the white glare of the headlights as the car topped the ridge.  Starr knew that nothing obstructed the view, that in daylight they could have seen the yellow-brown ribbon of trail where it curved over the ridge.  The machine was coming directly toward them for a short distance, but there was no light whatever.  Starr knew then that whoever they were, they were running without lights.

“Well, I guess we’d better be ambling along,” he said casually, when the automobile had purred its way beyond hearing.  “It’s three or four miles yet, and you’re tired.”

“Not so much.”  Helen May’s voice was a little lower than usual, but that was the only sign she gave of any recent deep emotion.  “I’d as soon walk awhile and let you ride.”  She shrank now from the thought of both riding.

“When you’ve ridden as far as I have,” said Starr, “you’ll know it’s a rest to get down and travel afoot for a few miles.”  He might have added that it would have been a rest had he not been hampered by those high-heeled riding boots, but consideration for her mental ease did not permit him to mention it.  He said no more, but started the goats ahead of him and kept them moving in a straight line for Sunlight Basin.  As before, Rabbit followed slavishly in his footsteps, nose dropped to the angle of placid acceptance, ears twitching forward and back so that he would lose no slightest sound.