It was an extremely puzzled young man who rode and rode that night in pursuit
of that evasive, nagging, altogether maddening tinkle. Always just over the
next little rise he would hear it, or down in the next little draw; never
close enough for him to discover the trick; never far enough away for him to
give up the chase. The stars he had been watching in camp swam through the
purple immensity above him and slid behind the skyline. Other stars as
brilliant appeared and began their slow, swimming journey. Pink rode, and
stopped to listen, and rode on again until it seemed to him that he must be
dreaming some terribly realistic nightmare.
He was sitting on his horse on a lava-crusted ridge, straining bloodshot eyes
into the mesa that stretched dimly before him, when dawn came streaking the
sky with blood orange and purple and crimson. The stars were quenched in that
flood of light; and Pink, looking now with clearer vision, saw that there was
no living thing in sight save a coyote trotting home from his night's hunting.
He turned short around and, getting his bearings from his memory of certain
stars and from the sun that was peering at him from the top of a bare peak,
and from that sense of direction which becomes second nature to a man who had
lived long on the range, started for camp with his ill news.
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