Striding along in this mental semi-detachment from the business in hand,
some three hundred yards down the coulée I tripped over a fallen
cottonwood and drove the point of a projecting limb clean through the
upper of my boot and into the calf of my leg--not a disabling wound, but
one that lacked nothing in the way of pain. The others stopped while I
pulled out the snag, which had broken off the trunk, and while I was
about this a familiar clattering noise uprose near-by. Ever hear a horse
shake himself, like a water-spaniel fresh from a dip, when he has been
tied for a long time in one place with the dead weight of a heavy stock
saddle on his back? There is a little by-play of grunting and clearing
of nostrils, then the slap of skirts and strings and stirrup-leathers--a
man never forgets or mistakes the sound of it, if he has ever slept in a
round-up camp with a dozen restless night-horses saddled and tied to a
wagon twenty feet from his bed. But it made us jump, welling up out of
the dark so unexpectedly and so near.

"Saddle-horse--tied," Mac tersely commented. We squatted in the long
grass and buck-brush, listening, and a few seconds later heard a horse
snort distinctly. This sound was immediately followed by the steady beat
of an impatient forefoot.

"Over yonder," I said. "And there's more than one, I think. Let's
investigate this. And we'd better not separate."

Fifty yards to the left we struck a cottonwood grove, and in the outer
edge of it loomed the vague outline of a horse--when we were almost
within reaching-distance of him. I ran my hand over the saddle and knew
it instantly for Bruce Haggin's rig. A half-minute of quiet prowling
revealed our full quota of livestock, even to the pack-horse that bore