Nor were these the only things
which he could not understand. Groping for the truth, he began carefully
to run over the things which had seemed strange to him and which now
struck him as being connected in some plan darkly hidden.
The girl was Henry Pollard's niece. He began with that fact. She was on
her way to Pollard's and on an errand which the banker Templeton had
called mad and dangerous. Some man had followed her, a man whom she had
twice seen on the trail and whose outfit resembled Thornton's, resembled
it too closely to be the result of chance! The same headstall with the
red tassel, the same grey neck-handkerchief, a sorrel horse....
"By God!" whispered the cowboy, a sudden light in his eyes, "he lamed my
horse so it would limp the same as his! So she'd be sure she had seen me
on the trail behind her! And when she came out and saw my horse limping
she knew I had lied to her!"
But why? Why? What lay back of all this?
In the end he put out the light, slipped the spur rowel into his vest
pocket, and went out to his horse. Then when an hour's search brought
him no nearer to the hidden truth for which he was groping, he gave up
trying to pick up this other man's trail in the rocky soil about
Harte's place and turned back toward the south-east and his own ranch.
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