"Nothin' a-tall to that. Didn't he save Clint Wadley's life? Didn't he stay by Dinsmore when the Kiowas had 'em holed? He fought good enough to get shot up this mo'nin', didn't he? No, sir. You'll find he's got me backed off the map so far as Miss Ramona goes. I know it, old-timer."
"Where do you get that notion you're a roughneck, Tex?" asked Jumbo. "You've read more books than any man on the range. You don't hell around like most of the boys. You don't drink. Mebbe you ain't exactly pretty, but yore face doesn't scare critters when they see it onexpected. An' when the band begins to play--Gentlemen, watch Tex."
"If the girls would only let you do the pickin' for 'em, Jumbo," suggested Roberts with his sardonic smile.
Through rabbit weed and curly mesquite, among the catclaw and the prickly pear, they followed the faint ribbon trail left by the outlaws in their retreat from the scene of the hold-up.
When it was too late to cut sign any longer, the Ranger gave orders to throw in to a small draw where the grass was good. At daybreak they were on the trail again and came within the hour to the body of Overstreet. They dug a grave in a buffalo run with their knives and buried the body as well as they could before they picked up again the tracks of two horses now traveling much faster.
"They're headin' for Palo Duro, looks like,'" commented Roberts.
"Looks like," agreed his friend.
Early in the afternoon the posse reached the little creek where the outlaws had breakfasted. Old Guadaloupe crisscrossed the ground like a bloodhound as he read what was written there. But before he made any report Roberts himself knew that a third person had joined the fugitives and that this recruit was a woman. The Ranger followed the Apache upstream, guessed by some feathers and some drops of blood that one of the outlaws had shot a prairie-hen, and read some hint of the story of the meeting between the woman and the bandit.
Was this woman some one who had been living in Palo Duro Cañon with the outlaws? Or was this meeting an accidental one? The odd thing about it was that there was no sign of her horse. She had come on foot, in a country where nobody ever travels that way.
Roberts told Guadaloupe to find out where the party had gone from the camp. He himself followed into the desert the footsteps of the woman who had come across it toward the creek. He was puzzled and a little disturbed in mind. She had not come from the cañon. What was a woman doing alone and on foot in this desert empty of human life for fifty miles or more?