“Tex?  No, Tex rode after stock.  Had some trouble with his hawse.  I heard him tellin’ the boys.  Said his hawse run away with him.  Come in all lathered up.”

Sudden turned back, went to the telephone, changed his mind.  No use worrying her mother by asking if she had got home, he thought.

“You’re sure she went home?” his eyes dwelt rather sharply upon Bill’s lean, leathery face.  Bill looked up from the slow disintegration of the splinter.  He spat toward the stove again, looked down at the splinter, and then got up quite unexpectedly.

“Hell, no!  I ain’t shore, but I can quick enough find out.”  He brushed past Sudden and took long steps toward the camp.  Sudden followed him.

The boys were standing in a group, holding their hat brims down to shield their eyes from the bitter glare of the sun while they gazed up into the sky, their faces turned towards the south.  A speck was scudding across the blue—­a speck that rapidly grew larger, circled downward in a great, easy spiral.  Sudden and Bill perforce turned and held their own hat brims while they looked.

“Sa-ay, if that there’s Skyrider sailin’ around in an airship, he’s shore got the laugh on us fellers,” Aleck observed, squinting his nose until his gums showed red above his teeth.  “Look at ’im come down, would yuh!”

“Wonder where he got it?” little Curley hazarded.  “I always told you fellers—­”

“Does anybody know where Mary V went?” Sudden’s voice brought them all facing him.  They looked at him uncomprehendingly for a minute, then uncertainly at one another.

“Why—­she was going to take a picture of a cactus.  I dunno where she went after that.”  This was Bud, a shade of uneasiness creeping into his face.

“Which way did she go?  Toward home?”

“She started that way—­back toward Snake Ridge—­”

“I seen her riding east,” Curley broke in.  “Jake shore was pickin’ ’em up and layin’ ’em down too.  I thought at first he was running off with her, but he wasn’t.  He slowed down, climbin’ that lava slope—­and after that I didn’t see no more of ’er.”

Sudden looked at his watch, frowning a little.  Mary V probably was all right; there was nothing unusual in her absence.  But this country south of Snake Ridge was closer to the lawless land across the boundary than he liked.  Their very errand down there gave proof enough of its character.  North of Snake Ridge, Sudden would merely have stored away a lecture for Mary V. Down here at Sinkhole—­

“You boys get out and hunt her up!” he snapped, almost as though they were to blame for her absence.  “I didn’t tell you before, but I’m telling you now that rustlers have been at work down here, and that’s why we’re taking the horses off this range.  This is no place for Mary V to be riding around by herself.”

“It’s a wonder he wouldn’t of woke up to that fact before,” Bud grumbled to Aleck, while he went limping to the corral.  “If she was a girl uh mine, she’d be home with her maw, where she belongs!”