“Cal, have any of you seen Smoke this morning?”
“Uh, why, no, Miss Sally. We just got up an’ ain’t seen nobody yet.”
“Damn!” she said, thinking furiously. “Did you see or hear anything out of the ordinary last night?”
Cal shook his head, his expression changing to one of alarm at her questions.
Without saying anything else, she turned back toward the barn and took off at a dead run. She wanted to go and see if Smoke’s horse was still there, though she knew he’d never have gotten on his horse and left without saying something to her, or at least grabbing his hat and guns from the cabin.
Cal glanced over his shoulder and called out, “Pearlie, somethin’s wrong. Get on out here.” Then he took off at a run after Sally, tucking in his shirt on the go.
Twenty minutes later, the three of them sat at the kitchen table in the ranch house. Sally had put some coffee on to boil while she told them about Smoke’s mysterious absence.
“And he didn’t say nothin’ ‘bout goin’ nowheres when you went to bed last night?” Pearlie asked as she handed him a steaming cup.
She shrugged and shook her head. “No. He went out on the porch to have a cigar and a cup of coffee before he came to bed, and he said he’d see me in a while.”
“It ain’t like Smoke to just take off without tellin’ nobody,” Cal said, getting up from his chair. “Especially if there was trouble brewin’.”
He moved out onto the front porch and began to look around, even getting down on his knees to get a better look at the ground around the porch.
“Look here,” he said to Sally and Pearlie, who were standing behind him. He pointed to a half-smoked cigar lying on the ground next to the porch, and a cup that still held a third of a cup of cold coffee in it on the arm of a wooden chair.
“Looks like somethin’ spooked him, or at least made him throw down his cigar and leave his coffee ‘fore he was through with either one,” Cal said.
“You see any tracks, Cal?” Pearlie asked, moving over to lean over his shoulder. Cal was smart and quick, but Pearlie was the more experienced tracker by far.
“Yeah. Most of ‘em head over toward the bunkhouse,” Cal replied, “but it looks like two sets go off down the road that’a way. And see, one set looks smaller, like it might’a been a woman, or maybe a boy.”
Pearlie bent down and gently fingered the tracks. “You’re right, Cal, and these are from last night too.”
“How can you tell that?” Cal asked.
“Here, see how the other tracks are crusted over where they’ve been wet by dew that’s dried a few times?”
When Cal nodded, Pearlie added, “Well, these here fresh tracks are still soft and damp, so they’ve only had the dew fall on them once and they haven’t dried yet, so they must’ve been made last night.”
“Pearlie,” Sally said, reaching inside the door and pulling a gun from Smoke’s holster, “follow the tracks and show us where they lead.”
Pearlie followed the tracks, walking bent over like an old man as the tracks led him down the road away from the Jensens’ cabin. Finally, he stopped and pointed. “Look there, Miss Sally. Tracks of a buckboard right here where these two sets stop.”
“Shoot!” Sally said. “That’s not much help. Everyone in the valley has a buckboard.”
“Yeah,” Cal added. “An’ followin’ those buckboard tracks once they get on the main road will be impossible.”
Pearlie, who was still staring at the tracks, shook his head. “Maybe, but these tracks show the iron on the wheels to be brand-new. Lookit how sharp the edges of the tracks are. They ain’t worn at all.” He looked up at Sally and Cal, who weren’t following him. “Don’t you see?” he asked. “All we have to do it ask Jed the blacksmith who’s had their wheels re-ironed lately and we’ll know who was here.”
Sally grabbed Pearlie and hugged him, causing him to blush furiously. “Pearlie, you’re a genius,” she said, and she turned and ran back toward the cabin.
By the time they got to Big Rock, it was almost nine o’clock in the morning, and they rode directly to Jed Blankenship’s blacksmith shop.
“Oh, no,” Sally said when she dismounted and walked up to the door. There was a sign on it that was too small for the boys to read from their horses.
“What’s it say, Miss Sally?” Cal asked.
“Jed’s not here. He’s gone to Silver City to help his brother who broke his leg. He won’t be back for at least a week.”
“You want me to hightail it over to Silver City and see what he has to say?” Pearlie asked.
Sally thought about it for a moment. “No, it’ll probably be quicker just to divide up the ranches around town and all of us ride around asking whose buckboard it might be.”
“Maybe it’s something simple, like one of your neighbors came by last night askin’ Smoke for help,” Cal observed.
Sally shook her head. “No. If that were the case, Smoke would still have had time to either wake me up or to get his hat and guns from the rack next to the door. You know he never leaves the house without them.”
Both Cal and Pearlie nodded. “That’s right, Miss Sally. An’ if’n one of the neighbors needed Smoke’s help, he would’ve asked either you or Cal or me to come along,” Pearlie said.
“Yes, so I suspect Smoke is in some kind of trouble, and it’s up to us to figure out who took him and then to make sure we get him back.”
“You know, it might be kind’a dangerous for you to go ridin’ up to the ranches askin’ ‘bout where Smoke is,”
