Far up in the mountains, in that section where head the Roaring Fork, One
Horse Creek, and the Del Oro, is a vast tract of wild, untraveled country
known vaguely as the Bad Lands. Somewhere among the thousand and one
cañons which cleft the huddled hills lay hidden Dead Man's Cache. Here
Black MacQueen retreated on those rare occasions when the pursuit grew hot
on his tracks. So the current report ran.
Whether the abductors of Simon West were to be found in the Cache or at
some other nest in the almost inaccessible ridges Jack Flatray had no
means of knowing. His plan was to follow the Roaring Fork almost to its
headquarters, and there establish a base for his hunt. It might take him a
week to flush his game. It might take a month. He clamped his bulldog jaw
to see the thing out to a finish.
Jack did not make the mistake of underestimating his job. He had followed
the trail of bad men often enough to know that, in a frontier country, no
hunt is so desperate as the man-hunt. Such men are never easily taken,
even if they do not have all the advantage in the deadly game of hide and
seek that is played in the timber and the pockets of the hills.
And here the odds all lay with the hunted. They knew every ravine and
gulch. Day by day their scout looked down from mountain ledges to watch
the progress of the posse.
Moreover, Flatray could never tell at what moment his covey might be
startled from its run. The greatest vigilance was necessary to make sure
his own party would not be ambushed. Yet slowly he combed the arroyos and
the ridges, drawing always closer to that net of gulches in which he knew
Dead Man's Cache must be located.
During the day the sheriff split his party into couples. Bellamy and Alan
McKinstra, Farnum and Charlie Hymer, young Yarnell and the sheriff. So
Jack had divided his posse, thus leaving at the head of each detail one
old and wise head. Each night the parties met at the rendezvous appointed
for the wranglers with the pack horses. From sunrise to sunset often no
face was seen other than those of their own outfit. Sometimes a solitary
sheep herder was discovered at his post. Always the work was hard,
discouraging, and apparently futile. But the young sheriff never thought
of quitting.
The provisions gave out. Jack sent back Hal Yarnell and Hegler, the
wrangler, to bring in a fresh supply. Meanwhile the young sheriff took a
big chance and scouted alone. He parted from the young Arkansan at the
head of a gulch which twisted snakelike into the mountains; Yarnell and
the pack outfit to ride to Mammoth, Flatray to dive still deeper into the
mesh of hills. He had the instinct of the scout to stick to the high
places as much as he could. Whenever it was possible he followed ridges,
so that no spy could look down upon him as he traveled. Sometimes the
contour of the country drove him into the open or down into hollows. But
in such places he advanced with the swift stealth of an Indian.