Chapter IV.

       Hunting the Deserter

       Table of Contents

      No. We’ll get the drop on him!” Uncle John told her, grimly.

      ‘‘You said ‘we.’ Do you mean that I can go with you?” I asked.

      “Sure you can go. I may need you to help herd him. Hannah can fireguard for you while we are gone,” he answered.

      “Oh, no! No! I would n’t stay here alone for all the world!” sister cried.

      “Then you will come with us. The telephone is n’t working; you can’t do any good here if a fire does break out. Let’s have some lunch and be off,” Uncle John told her.

      Hannah made no answer to that. She looked scared as she turned from us to start a fire in the stove.

      Of course I asked Uncle John about the firebugs, but he knew no more about them than I, and doubted that they had been found. I told him, then, about my find of the cave hole, and about seeing old Double Killer. And then we had lunch and planned how we should go after the deserter. We were to sneak down through the timber and strike the bottom of the canyon at a point below the little grass park, where I had seen the campfires, and then cautiously, step by step, move up and make our capture.

      ‘‘Afraid?’’ Uncle John asked Hannah, when she had washed the lunch dishes.

      “Yes, scared, but going with you, all the same!” she answered.

      We took up our rifles and Hannah belted on her pistol, and we started down the trail to the cabin, where Uncle John’s horse was tied and restlessly pawing the ground; and from there we turned off along the divide, followed it for four or five hundred yards, and began the descent into the canyon. The going was good under the spruces for some distance, and then we began having trouble to find a way past a series of small cliffs; there we had to be very careful where we stepped, lest we dislodge rocks to go crashing down and give the camper warning of our approach. When, at last, we arrived at the bottom of the canyon, we found that it was very narrow and full of boulders — some of them as large as a house—with only a few clumps of willows here and there along the stream. The grass park that we were heading for is on the south side of the stream, so we crossed and turned up toward it, and almost at once came into a well-used game trail running parallel with the creek, and about fifty yards above it. We had not followed it far when Uncle John, in the lead, paused and pointed at a muddy place in it: there, half obliterated by the hooves of passing deer, were the footprints of a man who had gone up the trail.

      ‘‘Days old. Wore broad shoes. Army shape,” he whispered to us as we bent over the tracks. “I guess we get Mr. Deserter, poco pronto “But he will fight!” said Hannah.

      “Wife-beaters generally don’t fight! However, maybe you’d better keep well behind us from here on,” he told her.

      Hannah said no more. We started on, but instead of dropping back she kept close behind me. Uncle John, looking over his shoulder, motioned her to slow up. She shook her head so determinedly that her two hair braids flopped straight out, and were so funny — her face red, her eyes snapping, that we put hand to mouth and laughed.

      All the same, this was no laughing matter. Why should n’t the deserter fight when he well knew that, if he was captured, he would go to jail for years and years? I was bound to face whatever was to happen, ahead there on the trail, but, oh, how I wished that Henry King had never come into our part of the mountains!

      Moving on silently in the beaten trail, and more and more slowly, we at last sighted the open grass park, and then stood a long time looking out at it, and searching the timber bordering it for our man. On our right some dead wood had been broken up and carried away, and a young spruce stripped of its branches — for a bed, of course, but of him there was no sign. ‘‘You two stand right here, while I circle around a bit,” Uncle John told us, and turned straight off to the left and was soon out of our sight. Hannah then came up beside me, pistol in hand, and we waited fearfully, hardly breathing, for whatever was to happen: waited for hours, it seemed, and at last heard Uncle John shout: ‘‘Come on! Come ahead, youngsters, the bird has flown!”

      I uncocked my rifle. Hannah slipped her pistol back into its holster. All my excitement went with Uncle John’s call. I felt suddenly tired. We went to the edge of the little opening, to Uncle John poking about under a thick branching spruce. “There’s where the sneak slept,” he said, pointing to a thick-laid bed of spruce branches. “And he has quilts: there’s a wad of cotton from one of them; and over there close to the creek is his fireplace.”

      We went to it, within a few feet of the creek, and found around it the end of a ham bone, several empty cans, and a pair of tattered socks. The ashes of the fireplace and several half-burned sticks in it were water-soaked.

      “Yes, the bird sure has flown!’’ Uncle John repeated.

      “It was he who frightened the deer and turkeys! He has gone west! Over on the other slope! But we did n’t see him cross the bare ridgetop —”

      “What is all this? Explain,” Uncle John interrupted. And when I had told him all about it, he said: “Sure it was he who scared them; but he never crossed the ridge, there in the open: he crossed farther south, where it is well timbered. Come. I ’ll bet we can find his tracks going up the canyon.”

      We did find them, almost at once, on the other side of the grass park and going up the canyon, and wondered why he had left this place, where he could live comfortably upon his stealings from me, and for what place he was heading?

      “Why, that is easily explained,’’ said Hannah. “He came up on top last night, found that we had moved all our food up to the lookout, and knew that his stealing had been discovered and it was time for him to go.”

      “He will not starve; he will rob the cattlemen’s camps, over on the Reservation, of everything he needs. You must ’phone over there about him as soon as the line is working. Well, back we go! Gee! I’m mad! Your Uncle Cleve and all the others, over there doing their best against the Huns, and this low-down coward sneaking about here in the forest, feeding his worthless carcass with our good grub! Well, maybe we’ll get him yet!” Uncle John exclaimed.

      We had no more than arrived at the cabin and sat down to get our breath after the long climb, when the two telephone linemen came in sight down the trail, and I asked Uncle John to say nothing to them, nor others, about my cave find. I wanted it all to myself.

      “Well, boy,” one of them said to me, as they dismounted, “you can ring up the office now; the line’s working. We found the break not three hundred yards below here. Not a break, either: the wire had been cut! Cut with a couple of rocks, it appeared like! Now, who in thunder could have done that?”

      Henry King! Deserter! Grub thief!” we cried.

      Uncle John began explaining about him, and I went in to the telephone and did the like to the Supervisor, in Springerville, who said that he would ask the Indian agent on the Reservation to order his Apache police out in search for King. Neither the police nor the sheriff’s posse on our side had been able to find the I.W.W. firebugs, and it was hoped that they had left the country. However, I was to remain at the lookout from sunrise to sunset until further orders.

      Uncle John was in a hurry to go home and insisted that Hannah return with him. But, first, he and the linemen brought my things at the lookout back to the cabin, packing them down