that he had come over that far, or even in that direction; because a horseman would almost certainly have been sighted by some of them in crossing a ridge somewhere.
It never occurred to anyone that the Kid might go down Flying U Creek and so into the breaks and the Badlands. Flying U Creek was fenced, and the wire gate was in its place—Chip had looked down along there, the first night, and had found the gate up just as it always was kept. Why should he suspect that the Kid had managed to open that gate and to close it after him? A little fellow like that?
So the searching parties, having no clue to that one incident which would at least have sent them in the right direction, kept to the outlying fringe of gulches which led into the broken edge of the benchland, and to the country west and north and south of these gulches. At that, there was enough broken country to keep them busy for several days, even when you consider the number of searchers.
Miss Allen did not want to go tagging along with some party. She did not feel as if she could do any good that way, and she wanted to do some good. She wanted to find that poor little fellow and take him to his mother. She had met his mother, just the day before, and had ridden with her for several miles. The look in the Little Doctor’s eyes haunted Miss Allen until she felt sometimes as if she must scream curses to the heavens for so torturing a mother. And that was not all; she had looked into Chip’s face, last night—and she had gone home and cried until she could cry no more, just with the pity of it.
She left the more open valley and rode down a long, twisting canyon that was lined with cliffs so that it was impossible to climb out with a horse. She was sure she could not get lost or turned around, in a place like that, and it seemed to her as hopeful a place to search as any. When you came to that, they all had to ride at random and trust to luck, for there was not the faintest clue to guide them. So Miss Allen considered that she could do no better than search all the patches of brush in the canyon, and keep on going.
The canyon ended abruptly in a little flat, which she crossed. She had not seen the tracks of any horse going down, but when she was almost across the flat she discovered tracks of cattle, and now and then the print of a shod hoof. Miss Allen began to pride herself on her astuteness in reading these signs. They meant that some of the Happy Family had driven cattle this way; which meant that they would have seen little Claude Bennett—that was the Kid’s real name, which no one except perfect strangers ever used—they would have seen the Kid or his tracks, if he had ridden down here.
Miss Allen, then, must look farther than this. She hesitated before three or four feasible outlets to the little flat, and chose the one farthest to the right. That carried her farther south, and deeper into a maze of gulches and gorges and small, hidden valleys. She did not stop, but she began to see that it was going to be pure chance, or the guiding hand of a tender Providence, if one ever did find anybody in this horrible jumble. She had never seen such a mess. She believed that poor little tot had come down in here, after all; she could not see why, but then you seldom did know why children took a notion to do certain unbelievable things. Miss Allen had taught the primary grade in a city school, and she knew a little about small boys and girls and the big ideas they sometimes harbored.
She rode and rode, trying to put herself mentally in the Kid’s place. Trying to pick up the thread of logical thought—children were logical sometimes—startlingly so.
“I wonder,” she thought suddenly, “if he started out with the idea of hunting cattle! I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he did—living on a cattle ranch, and probably knowing that the men were down here somewhere.” Miss Allen, you see, came pretty close to the truth with her guess.
Still, that did not help her find the Kid. She saw a high, bald peak standing up at the mouth of the gorge down which she was at that time picking her way, and she made up her mind to climb that peak and see if she might not find him by looking from that point of vantage. So she rode to the foot of the pinnacle, tied her horse to a bush and began to climb.
Peaks like that are very deceptive in their height Miss Allen was slim and her lungs were perfect, and she climbed steadily and as fast as she dared. For all that it took her a long while to reach the top—much longer than she expected. When she reached the black rock that looked, from the bottom, like the highest point of the hill, she found that she had not gone much more than two-thirds of the way up, and that the real peak sloped back so that it could not be seen from below at all.
Miss Allen was a persistent young woman. She kept climbing until she did finally reach the highest point, and could look down into gorges and flats and tiny basins and canyons and upon peaks and ridges and worm-like windings, and patches of timber and patches of grass and patches of barren earth and patches of rocks all jumbled up together—. Miss Allen gasped from something more than the climb, and sat down upon a rock, stricken with a sudden, overpowering weakness. “God in heaven!” she whispered, appalled. “What a place to get lost in!”
She sat there a while and stared dejectedly down upon that wild orgy of the earth’s upheaval which is the Badlands. She felt as though it was sheer madness even to think of finding anybody in there. It was worse than a mountain country, because in the mountains there is a certain semblance of some system in the canyons and high ridges and peaks. Here every thing—peaks, gorges, tiny valleys and all—seemed to be just dumped down together. Peaks rose from the middle of canyons; canyons were half the time blind pockets that ended abruptly against a cliff.
“Oh!” she cried aloud, jumpin up and gesticulating wildly. “Baby! Little Claude! Here! Look up this way!” She saw him, down below, on the opposite side from where she had left her horse.
The Kid was riding slowly up a gorge. Silver was picking his way carefully over the rocks—they looked tiny, down there! And they were not going toward home, by any means. They were headed directly away from home.
The cheeks of Miss Allen were wet while she shouted and called and waved her hands. He was alive, anyway. Oh, if his mother could only be told that he was alive! Oh, why weren’t there telephones or something where they were needed! If his poor mother could see him!
Miss Allen called again, and the Kid heard her. She was sure that he heard her, because he stopped—that pitiful, tiny speck down there on the horse!—and she thought he looked up at her. Yes, she was sure he heard her, and that finally he saw her; because he took off his hat and waved it over his head—just like a man, the poor baby!
Miss Allen considered going straight down to him, and then walking around to where her horse was tied. She was afraid to leave him while she went for the horse and rode around to where he was. She was afraid she might miss him somehow the Badlands had stamped that fear deep into her soul.
“Wait!” she shouted, her hands cupped around her trembling lips, tears rolling down her cheeks “Wait baby! I’m coming for you.” She hoped that the Kid heard what she said, but she could not be sure, for she did not hear him reply. But he did not go on at once, and she thought he would wait.
Miss Allen picked up her skirts away from her ankles and started running down the steep slope. The Kid, away down below, stared up at her. She went down a third of the way, and stopped just in time to save herself from going over a sheer wall of rocks—stopped because a rock which she dislodged with her foot rolled down the slope a few feet, gave a leap into space and disappeared.
A step at a time Miss Allen crept down to where the rock had bounced off into nothingness, and gave one look and crouched close to the earth. A hundred feet, it must be, straight down. After the first shock she looked to the right and the left and saw that she must go back, and down upon the other side.
Away down there at the bottom, the Kid sat still on his horse and stared up at her. And Miss Allen calling to him that she would come, started back up to the peak.
Chapter 18. The Long Way Round
Miss Allen turned to yell encouragingly to the Kid, and she saw that he was going on slowly, his head turned to watch her. She told him to wait where he was, and she would come around the mountain