He watched for a few minutes longer, sweeping his glasses slowly to right and left.  He took another look down into the Basin and saw no one stirring, that being about the time when the plump sister was rolling up her fancy work and tapering off her conversation to the point of making her adieu.  Starr did not watch long enough for his own peace of mind.  Five more minutes would have brought the plump one into plain view with her brother and Helen May, and would have identified Holman Sommers as the escort of a lady caller.  But those five minutes Starr spent in crawling back down the peak on the side farthest from the Basin, leaving Holman Sommers sticking in his mind with the unpleasant flavor of mystery.

He mounted Rabbit again and made a detour of several miles so that he might come up on the ridge behind Medina’s without running any risk of crossing the trail of the men he wanted to watch.  About two o’clock he stopped at a shallow, brackish stream and let Rabbit rest and feed for an hour while Starr himself climbed another rocky pinnacle and scanned the country between there and Medina’s.

The gate that let one off the main road and into the winding trail which led to the house stood out in plain view at the mouth of a shallow draw.  This was not the trail which led out from the home ranch toward San Bonito, where Starr had been going when he saw the track of the mysterious automobile, but the trail one would take in going from Medina’s to Malpais.  The ranch house itself stood back where the draw narrowed, but the yellow-brown trail ribboned back from the gate in plain view.

Here again Starr was fated to get a glimpse and no more.  He focussed his glasses on the main road first; picked up the Medina branch to the gate, followed the trail on up the draw, and again he picked up a man riding a bay horse.  And just as he was adjusting his lenses for a sharper clarity of vision, the horse trotted around a bend and disappeared from sight.

Starr swore, but that did not bring the man back down the trail.  Starr was not at all sure that this was the same man he had seen in the draw, and he was not sure that either was the man who had shot at him.  But roosting on that heat-blistered pinnacle swearing about the things he didn’t know struck him as a profitless performance, so he climbed down, got into the saddle again, and rode on.

He reached the granite ridge back of Medina’s about four o’clock in the afternoon.  He was tired, for he had been going since daylight, and for a part of the time at least he had been going on foot, climbing the steep, rocky sides of peaks for the sake of what he might see from the top, and then climbing down again for sake of what some one else might see if he stayed too long.  His high-heeled riding boots that Helen May so greatly admired were very good-looking and very comfortable when he had them stuck into stirrups to the heel.  But they had never been built for walking.  Therefore his feet ached abominably.  And there was the heat, the searing, dry heat of midsummer in the desert country.  He was dog tired, and he was depressed because he had not seemed able to accomplish anything with all his riding and all his scanning of the country.