Presently Cheyenne spoke.  “I been makin’ a plan.”

“I didn’t say a word,” laughed Bartley.

“You didn’t need to.  I kind of got what you were thinkin’.  This here is big country.  When you’re ridin’ this kind of country with some fella, you can read his mind almost as good as a horse can.  You was thinkin’ I was kind of twisted and didn’t know which way to head.  Now take that there hoss, Joshua.  Plenty times I’ve rode him up to a fork in the trail, and kep’ sayin’ to myself, ‘We’ll take the right-hand fork.’  And Joshua always took the fork I was thinkin’ about.  You try it with Dobe, sometime.”

“I have read of such things,” said Bartley.

“Well, I know ’em.  What would you say if I was to tell you that Joshua knowed once they was a fella ridin’ behind me, five miles back, and out of sight—­and told me, plain?”

“I wouldn’t say anything.”

“There’s where you’re wise.  I can talk to you about such things.  But when I try to talk to the boys like that, they just josh, till I git mad and quit.  They ain’t takin’ me serious.”

“What is your plan?” queried Bartley.

Cheyenne reined up and dismounted.  “Step down, and take a look,” he suggested.

Bartley dismounted.  Cheyenne pointed out horse-tracks on the trail along the edge of the hills.

“Five hosses,” he asserted.  “Two of ’em is mine.  That leaves three that are carryin’ weight.  But we’re makin’ a mistake for ourselves, trailin’ Panhandle direct.  He figures mebby I’d do that.  I got to outfigure him.  I don’t want to git blowed out of my saddle by somebody in the brush, just waitin’ for me to ride up and git shot.  I got the way he’s headed, and by to-morrow mornin’ I’ll know for sure.

“If he’d been goin’ to swing back, to fool me, he’d ‘a’ done it before he hit the timber, up yonder.  Once he gits in them hills he’ll head straight south, for they ain’t no other trail to ride on them ridges.  But mebby he cut along the foothills, first.  I got to make sure.”

Late that afternoon and close to the edge of the foothills, Cheyenne lost the tracks.  He spent over an hour finding them again.  Bartley could discern nothing definite, even when Cheyenne pointed to a queer, blurred patch in some loose earth.

“It looks like the imprint of some coarse cloth,” said Bartley.

“Gunnysack.  They pulled the shoes off my hosses and sacked their feet.”

“How about their own horses?”

“They been ridin’ hard ground, and the tracks don’t show, plain.  Panhandle figured, when I seen that only the tracks of three horses showed, I’d think he had turned my hosses loose on the big mesa.  He stops, pulls their shoes, sacks their feet, and leads ’em over there.  Whoever done it was afoot, and steppin’ careful.  Hell, I could learn that yella-bellied hoss-thief how to steal hosses right, if I was in the business.”

“Looks like a pretty stiff drill up those hills,” remarked Bartley.