There was a growing light in the east, while the west was still dark.  I thought of the earth as throwing back the gray shadowy covers from its morning face and piling them about its feet; I thought of some joke of Beverly’s; and I wondered about one of the oxen that had seemed sick in the evening.  I tried to think of nothing and a thousand things came into my mind.  But of life and death and love and suffering, I thought not at all.

Meantime, Jondo waited anxiously for my coming.  Rex and Beverly had gone to sleep at the end of their watch and nobody else in camp knew of my going.  At dawn a breeze began to swing in from the north, and with its refreshing touch the weariness and worries of yesterday were swept away.  Everybody wakened in a good humor.  But Jondo had not slept, and his face was sterner than ever as the duties of the day began.

Before sunrise I began to be missed.

“Where’s Gail?” Bill Banney was the first to ask.

“That’s Clarenden’s job, not mine,” another of the bull-whackers resented a command of Jondo’s.

“Gail!  Gail!  Anybody on earth seen Gail Clarenden this morning?” came from a far corner of the camp.

“Have you lost a man, Jondo?” Smith, still sick in his wagon, inquired.

And the sun was filling the eastern horizon with a roseate glow.  It would be above the edge of the plains in a little while, and still I had not returned.

Breakfast followed, with many questions for the absent one.  There was an eagerness to be off early and an uneasiness began to pervade the camp.

“Jondo, you’ll have to dig up Gail now.  I saw him putting out northwest about one o’clock,” Rex Krane said, aside to the train captain.

“If he isn’t here in ten minutes.  I’ll have to start out after him,” Jondo replied.

Ten minutes are long to one who waits.  The boys were ready for the camp order.  “Catch up!” to start the harnessing of teams.  But it was not given.  The sun’s level rays, hot and yellow, smote the camp, and a low murmur ran from wagon to wagon.  Jondo waited a minute longer, then he climbed to the wagon tongue at the head of the ellipse of vehicles, his commanding form outlined against the open space, his fine face illumined by the sunlight.

“Boys, listen to me.”

Men listened when Jondo spoke.

“I believe we are in danger, but you have doubted my word.  I leave the days to prove who is right.  At midnight I sent Gail Clarenden to find out what is beyond that ridge—­a band of men running parallel with us that shadows us day by day.  If he is not here in ten minutes, we must go after him.”

A hush fell on the camp.  The oxen switched at the first nipping insects of the morning, and the ponies and mules, with that horse-sense that all horsemen have observed in them at times, stood as if waiting for a decision to be made.

Beverly Clarenden was first to speak.