Charlton did not answer his greeting.  He flushed to his throat, turned abruptly on his heel, and began to talk with Ryan.  The hillman wanted it clearly understood that the feud he cherished was only temporarily abandoned.  But even Roy noticed that the young Admirable Crichton had lost some of his debonair aplomb.

The little Irishman explained this with a grin to Dave as they were riding together half an hour later.  “It’s not so easy to get away with that slow insolence of his while he’s wearing that forgit-me-not young Beaudry handed him in the mix-up.”

“Sort of spoils the toutensemble, as that young Melrose tenderfoot used to say—­kinder as if a bald-haided guy was playing Romeo and had lost his wig in the shuffle,” agreed Dave.

By the middle of the forenoon they were well up in the headwaters of the two creeks they were to work.  Charlton divided the party so as to cover both watersheds as they swept slowly down.  Roy was on the extreme right of those working Del Oro.

It was a rough country, with wooded draws cached in unexpected pockets of the hills.  Here a man might lie safely on one of a hundred ledges while the pursuit drove past within fifty feet of him.  As Roy’s pinto clambered up and down the steep hills, he recalled the advice of Dave to ride a buckskin “that melts into the atmosphere like a patch of bunch grass.”  He wished he had taken that advice.  A man looking for revenge could crouch in the chaparral and with a crook of his finger send winged death at his enemy.  A twig crackling under the hoof of his horse more than once sent an electric shock through his pulses.  The crash of a bear through the brush seemed to stop the beating of his heart.

Charlton had made a mistake in putting Beaudry on the extreme right of the drive.  The number of men combing the two creeks was not enough to permit close contact.  Sometimes a rider was within hail of his neighbor.  More often he was not.  Roy, unused to following the rodeo, was deflected by the topography of the ridge so far to the right that he lost touch with the rest.

By the middle of the afternoon he had to confess to himself with chagrin that he did not even know how to reach Del Oro.  While he had been riding the rough wooded ridge above, the creek had probably made a sharp turn to the left.  Must he go back the way he had come?  Or could he cut across country to it?  It was humiliating that he could not even follow a small river without losing the stream and himself.  He could vision the cold sneer of Charlton when he failed to appear at the night rendezvous.  Even his friends would be annoyed at such helplessness.

After an hour’s vain search he was more deeply tangled in the web of hills.  He was no longer even sure how to get down from them into the lower reaches of country toward which he was aiming.

While he hesitated on a ridge there came to him a faint, far cry.  He gave a shout of relief, then listened for his answer.  It did not come.  He called again, a third time, and a fourth.  The wind brought back no reply.  Roy rode in the direction of the sound that had first registered itself on his ears, stopping every minute or two to shout.  Once he fancied he heard again the voice.