The trail grew stiffer.  It circled into a draw down which tumbled a jocund little stream.  Trout, it might be safely guessed, lurked here in the riffles and behind the big stones.  An ideal camping-ground this, but the rider rejected it apparently without consideration.  He passed into the canon beyond, and so by a long uphill climb came to the higher reaches of the hills.

He rode patiently, without any hurry, without any hesitation.  Here again a reader of character might have found something significant in the steadiness of the man.  Once on the trail, it would not be easy to shake him off.

By the count of years Dingwell might be in the early forties.  Many little wrinkles radiated fanlike from the corners of his eyes.  But whatever his age time had not tamed him.  In the cock of those same steel-blue eyes was something jaunty, something almost debonair, that carried one back to a youth of care-free rioting in a land of sunshine.  Not that Mr. Dingwell was given to futile dissipations.  He had the reputation of a responsible ranchman.  But it is not to be denied that little devils of mischief at times danced in those orbs.

Into the hills the trail wound across gulches and along the shoulders of elephant humps.  It brought him into a country of stunted pines and red sandstone, and so to the summit of a ridge which formed part of the rim of a saucer-shaped basin.  He looked down into an open park hedged in on the far side by mountains.  Scrubby pines straggled up the slopes from arroyos that cleft the hills.  By divers unknown paths these led into the range beyond.

A clump of quaking aspens was the chief landmark in the bed of the park.  Though this was the immediate destination of Mr. Dingwell, since the hoofprints he was following plunged straight down toward the grove, yet he took certain precautions before venturing nearer.  He made sure that the 45-70 Winchester that lay across the saddle was in working order.  Also he kept along the rim of the saucer-shaped park till he came to a break where a creek tumbled down in a white foam through a ravine.

“It’s a heap better to be safe than to be sorry,” he explained to himself cheerfully.  “They call this Lonesome Park, and maybe so it deserves its name to-day.  But you never can tell, Dave.  We’ll make haste slowly if you don’t mind.”

Along the bank of the creek he descended, letting his sure-footed cowpony pick its own way while he gave strict attention to the scenery.  At a bend of the stream he struck again the trail of the riders he had been following and came from there directly to the edge of the aspen clump.

Apparently his precautions were unnecessary.  He was alone.  There could be no doubt of that.  Only the tracks of feet and the ashes of a dead fire showed that within a few days a party had camped here.