Twice in the last month he had heard and seen a bunch of Kate’s riders coming home from Cordova where they had gone to gamble. But this fact had been unproductive of anything sinister.
They had ridden boldly, as behooves innocent men, their horses climbing slowly with rattle of spur and bit-chain, the squeak and whine of saddles.
Selwood had reached a hand to his horse’s nose to preclude its neighing, and had seen them pass on up and disappear.
Next day he had unostentatiously made sure that these men had played at McKane’s—in both instances.
And now he waited again, seemingly in a foolish quest.
He knew it would seem so to an observer. It seemed so to him when he regarded it with reason. But reason was not actuating him. It was instinct—hunch.
So Sheriff Price Selwood—whom Kate Cathrew quite frankly hated—sat in the darkness and watched and listened beside her trail, a lost little thread on the vast expanse of the wooded slopes.
A long hour passed, filled with the soundful silence of the wilderness. He heard an owl call and call in mournful quaver from far below, another answer. He knew that some hunting animal was abroad in the manzanita to his right, for he caught a thud and rustle, the pitiful, shrill scream of a rabbit. A night bird gave out a sweet, alert note from time to time and an insect drummed in a pine tree.
And then he heard, or thought he did, another sound.
It was so far off and faint that he could not be sure, and for a time he fancied he might have been mistaken. Then it came again—the crack of hoofs on stone, and once more silence.