The Little Doctor—oh, let us not talk about the Little Doctor. Such agonies as she suffered go too deep for words.
The next day after that, Chip saddled a horse and let her ride beside him. Chip was afraid to leave her at the ranch—afraid that she would go mad. So he let her ride—they rode together. They did not go far from the ranch. There was always the fear that someone might bring him in while they were gone. That fear drove them back, every hour or two. Then another fear would drive them forth again.
Up in another county there is a creek called Lost Child Creek. A child was lost—or was it two children?—and men hunted and hunted and hunted, and it was months before anything was found. Then a cowboy riding that way found—just bones. Chip knew about that creek which is called Lost Child. He had been there and he had heard the story, and he had seen the—father and had shuddered—and that was long before he had known the feeling a father has for his child. What he was deadly afraid of now was that the Little Doctor would hear about that creek, and how it had gotten its name.
What he dreaded most for himself was to think of that creek. He kept the Little Doctor beside him and away from that Job’s comforter, the Countess, and tried to keep her hope alive while the hours dragged their leaden feet over the hearts of them all.
A camp was hastily organized in One Man Coulee and another out beyond Denson’s place, and men went there to the camps for a little food and a little rest, when they could hold out no longer. Chip and the Little Doctor rode from camp to camp, intercepted every party of searchers they glimpsed on the horizon, and came back to the ranch, hollow-eyed and silent for the most part. They would rest an hour, perhaps. Then they would ride out again.
The Happy Family seemed never to think of eating, never to want sleep. Two days—three days—four days—the days became a nightmare. Irish, with a warrant out for his arrest, rode with the constable, perhaps—if the search chanced to lead them together. Or with Big Medicine, whom he had left in hot anger. H. J. Owens and these other claim-jumpers hunted with the Happy Family and apparently gave not a thought to claims.
Miss Allen started out on the second day and hunted through all the coulees and gulches in the neighborhood of her claim—coulees and gulches that had been searched frantically two or three times before. She had no time to make whimsical speeches to Andy Green, nor he to listen. When they met, each asked the other for news, and separated without a thought for each other. The Kid—they must find him—they must.
The third day, Miss Allen put up a lunch, told her three claim partners that she should not come back until night unless that poor child was found, and that they need not look for her before dark and set out with the twinkle all gone from her humorous brown eyes and her mouth very determined.
She met Pink and the Native Son and was struck with the change which two days of killing anxiety had made in them. True, they had not slept for forty-eight hours, except an hour or two after they had been forced to stop and eat. True, they had not eaten except in snatches. But it was not that alone which made their faces look haggard and old and haunted. They, too, were thinking of Lost Child Creek and How it had gotten its name.
Miss Allen gleaned a little information from them regarding the general whereabouts of the various searching parties. And then, having learned that the foothills of the mountains were being searched minutely because the Kid might have taken a notion to visit Meeker’s; and that the country around Wolf Butte was being searched, because he had once told Big Medicine that when he got bigger and his dad would let him, he was going over there and kill wolves to make Doctor Dell some rugs: and that the country toward the river was being searched because the Kid always wanted to see where the Happy Family drove the sheep to, that time when Happy Jack got shot under the arm; that all the places the Kid had seemed most interested in were being searched minutely—if it could be possible to; search minutely a country the size of that! Having learned all that, Miss Allen struck off by herself, straight down into the Badlands where nobody seemed to have done much searching.
The reason for that was, that the Happy Family had come out of the breaks on the day that the Kid was lost. They had not ridden together, but in twos and threes because they drove out several small bunches of cattle that they had gleaned, to a common centre in One Man Coulee. They had traveled by the most feasible routes through that rough country, and they had seen no sign of the Kid or any other rider.
They did not believe 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