Law watched his two friends ride away, then he wiped his Winchester and saw to his cinch.  This done he raised Bessie Belle’s head and kissed the lip that had so often explored his palm for sugar.  With a miserable ache in his throat he mounted and rode off to pick up the trail of the man on the sorrel pony.

Fortunately this was not difficult, for the tracks of a running horse are plain in soft ground.  Finding where his quarry had broken cover, Law set out at a lope.

The fellow had ridden in a wide semicircle at first, then, finding he was not pursued, he had slackened pace, and, in consequence, the signs became more difficult to follow.  They seemed to lead in the direction of Las Palmas, which Dave judged must be fully twelve miles away, and when they continued to maintain this course the Ranger became doubly interested.  Could it be, he asked himself, that his quarry would have the audacity to ride to the Austin headquarters?  If so, his identification promised to become easy, for a man on a sorrel cow-pony was more than likely to be observed.  Perhaps he thought himself secure and counted upon the assistance of some friend or confederate among the Las Palmas ranch-hands in case of pursuit.  That seemed not unreasonable, particularly inasmuch as he could have no suspicion that it was a Ranger who was on his trail.

Dave lost the hoof-prints for a time, but picked them up again at the pasture gate a few miles farther on, and was able to trace them far enough to assure himself that his quarry was indeed headed for the Austin house and had no intention of swinging southward toward the Lewis headquarters.

By this time the rain had done its work, and to follow the tracks became a matter of guesswork.  Night was coming on also, and Dave realized that at this rate darkness would find him far from his goal.  Therefore he risked his own interpretation of the rider’s intent and pushed on without pausing to search out the trail step by step.  At the second gate the signs indicated that his man was little more than an hour ahead of him.

The prospect of again seeing the ruddy-haired mistress of Las Palmas stirred Law more deeply than he cared to admit.  Alaire Austin had been seldom out of his thoughts since their first meeting, for, after the fashion of men cut off from human society, he was subject to insistent fancies.  Dave had many times lived over those incidents at the water-hole, and for the life of him he could not credit the common stories of Alaire’s coldness.  To him, at least, she had appeared very human, and after they had once become acquainted she had been unaffected and friendly.