CHAPTER XVI--A STARTLING DISCOVERY

He crawled out of the cavity and looked about him.

Away to the southeast he could see the lake gleaming like a sheet of molten fire in the rays of the setting sun. Between him and it, as well as stretching all round as far as he could see, were densely-wooded declivities backed by equally densely-wooded heights.

The view northward was cut off by a high ridge of splintered scaurs, or cliff-like rocks, rising in terraces upon one another.

“H’m!” he said, “my way to Bill Seymour’s hut lies over those rocks, or else round them to west or east. Across the ridge, due northward, I should say, would be the quicker route, if it can be done; and I haven’t too much time to spare if I would do it before darkness is on me again. But how am I going to get up those cliffs?”

Piercing right through the ridge, he saw, was the tree-arched water-slide. It cleft its way cleanly through all the rocky terraces. From where he was standing close beside the water-course, he could see the blue sky on the other side of the ridge through the chasm or gorge it had carved or channeled for itself, probably through countless ages.

“If I could get up the water-course against the stream,” he muttered, “I should be past those unscalable cliffs anyway, and possibly on a plateau which I might easily get across to the farther side, where I want to go.”

He walked to the edge of the water-course, just where the first of the terraced cliffs began and prevented him keeping on the bank itself any longer.

A tree overhung the swift flowing current below. He climbed out on to the branches as far as he could in safety--until they began to dip and crack under him.

Parting the leaves around him, and craning his neck, he looked up-stream. He saw that the slide went up--if such an expression may be rightly used--about fifty more feet, overshadowed the whole way by stunted trees clinging to the almost perpendicular sides of the cleft.

It would be impossible to try to walk up the bed of the stream. The slope was too acute, the power of the current would sweep his legs from under him, and he would have absolutely nothing to drag himself up by.

But there was nothing to prevent him clambering from tree to tree up the cleft like a monkey, passing from one branch to another! The trees all grew so close together and their branches were so intertwined it would be easy enough.

He had his rifle slung upon his back. He slackened the sling somewhat, and gave it a twist round his left arm near the shoulder so as to guard against its being knocked off his back by a branch or creeper entangling it. Then, making sure that his pistol-holster was securely buttoned, he started on the gorilla-like feat.

It was, as he expected, the easiest task imaginable to swing himself along and up, from branch to branch and tree to tree. He was quite enjoying it, and telling himself laughingly that he was certainly acting out the theory that men came from monkeys originally, when his head rose above the top of the water-slide or sloped fall.

He could see over it and through the cleft in the gorge on to the plateau beyond. And what he saw filled him, at first, with the greatest astonishment, and then with supreme satisfaction.

The water-course continued on the level for only some ten feet; then it swerved sharply to the right hand, and was a mountain torrent, fed by several little rills around, tumbling from the greater heights of the ridge in easy cascades.

Beyond where the stream curves round, the ground rose suddenly again for a few yards, consisting of bare and fairly smooth rock; then it fell away apparently like a precipice.

And across the wide valley, past this drop, on the gentle grassy slopes of his opposite side, which rose considerably higher, _a number of horses and cattle and sheep were peacefully grazing_!

“I must have reached Lonewater Ranch; be close to it,” Sergeant Dick muttered, delightedly. “I must have traveled much farther than I thought I had last night, and I’ve saved myself the trouble of calling on Bill Seymour, the shepherd, and borrowing his horse.

“And yet--yet I can hardly credit that I’ve got so far--and I understood Arnold to say that the ranch was northward--fifteen miles or thereabouts northward of these cliffs. It can’t be Lonewater after all that I have struck. But--but they did not mention any other farm or ranch. In fact, they assured me there was no other nearer than twenty miles.”

Puzzled beyond measure, therefore, he clambered on through the remaining trees until he was over the verge of the slide, when he swung himself down lightly and dropped into the bed of the stream.

In another minute he was standing on the rock at the edge of the precipice, staring stupidly at what lay before him.

It was a great cup-like valley, completely enclosed by the high circular ridge upon which he stood. There seemed to be no outlet whatever to it, and the only sign of a human habitation that he could see was a lean-to shed, or log-hut, built against the face of a scaur or cliff just below on his left hand.

As he looked towards this hut, he discovered to his further surprise that a zigzag track led down to it _from where he stood_.

He turned and looked about him in quest of where the path began, and he saw that rude steps had been cut in the rocky escarpment beside the cascading torrent on his right hand to the top of the ridge.

It was only on his side of the valley that the earth fell away precipitously. The other three sides rose in the gentlest of slopes to a greater height.

All over the great cup were scattered horses and cattle. There were fully two hundred head of cattle, twice as many sheep, and some fifty or sixty horses.

“Well, this is an enigma to me--a puzzling riddle if you like,” he was murmuring, when, like light from heaven, came the startling reading of the mystery, the true solution of the strange problem.

His eye had rested inadvertently--casually--upon the brands of three of the sheep closest to him--just below near the hut. Their brands were plainly visible in the rarefied mountain air, and--_they were not the same; they were different_.

One was a circle with lines radiating from it all round--evidently the sun in glory--with an eight-pointed star inside it.

Another was B.E. in a triangle, all three angles of which were cut by a circle.

The third brand seemed much older and simpler than the other two, and consisted merely of a triangle with P.F. within it.

“My Heaven!” gasped Sergeant Dick, recoiling a step under the shock. “The place is plainly a cattle-thieves’ ‘duffing-yard’ or ground--the secret place where they conceal the stolen cattle, sheep, and horses, and change the brands on these before taking them to some other part of the country and selling them.

“And--and there can be only one gang operating on such a scale as this--the mysterious White Hood Bandits.”

The thought had no sooner occurred to him than he realized the danger he was in, standing there exposed upon the ridge to any of the desperate band who might be in the valley or on the cliffs around.

Without a doubt the log-hut below was occupied by some of the gang.

It was fairly commodious, and would contain at least three apartments. A stovepipe protruded from the sloping roof, but there was no smoke issuing from it.

Sergeant Dick promptly whipped back into the cleft or little gorge again, out of sight of any one who might possibly be in the valley.

Flattening himself against the rock, he hurriedly freed the flap of his holster and drew his revolver, looking anxiously the while to either side and behind him towards the water-slide.

No whistle or other alarming signal was heard.

He breathed more freely again, but with all his pulses throbbing excitedly, he removed his Stetson hat from his head and unslung his rifle from his back. Carrying the revolver and his hat together in his left hand, his rifle in his right, he crawled back on his knees to the edge of the precipice.

He close-hugged the side of the cleft as he went, and kept his eyes ranging warily, searchingly, over the ridge down which the pathway came.

Reaching the precipice again, he crouched behind a convenient boulder close to its edge, peering cautiously round the rock, so as only to show the side of his face and one eye. He surveyed the hut again, closely.

“There can’t be any one at home!” he told himself presently, “or else the gang deem themselves so secure as not to trouble about keeping any watch. And really I don’t suppose any one but themselves knows about this valley--has ever been inside it.

“There must be some other way they use for the ingress and egress of the cattle. It is probably on the extreme west or northwest side of the valley; the ridges seem rather tangled over there.

“Well, I can do nothing alone--single-handed. The gang are said to number nine in full strength. I couldn’t possibly hope to tackle so many at once. I’ll go back the way I came, and try in some way to communicate with the Arnolds again. I shouldn’t be surprised that the redskins have left the vicinity of the lake by this, realizing the hard nut ‘Water Castle’ is to crack. The Arnolds, father and sons, are five in number, and with myself would make six.

“If we crept up this water-slide in the dead of to-night or at dawn to-morrow we ought to have all the advantages of a surprise, and wipe out or round up the entire gang. If not all at once, well, in two affrays--by lying in wait for the rest of the gang after settling the batch we catch at home.”

With this design, he wriggled back to the edge of the water-slide and, still keeping his chin on his shoulder and his eyes scanning the ridges in sight, he climbed up into one of the trees overhanging the water and began hurriedly to descend the side as he had ascended it, that is, by clambering down from branch to branch and tree to tree.

“Yes,” he said, half aloud to himself, when about halfway down, “that brand ‘B.E.’ in a triangle, with a circle cutting the angles, was undoubtedly originally ‘P.F.’ inside a triangle--was faked from it.

“What could be simpler than to alter a ‘P’ into a ‘B,’ and an ‘F’ into an ‘E,’ and then stamp a circle over the triangle. ‘P.F.’ is plainly the Pelson-Fellowes ranch brand--the next ranch, as Arnold told me, to the Lonewater. And I shouldn’t be surprised that the other brand I saw was Lonewater’s, faked or altered in some similar way so as to render it unrecognizable.”

He was soon at the bottom of the water-slide again and then, with the setting sun as his guide, he struck away down the mountain-side and through the dense forest clothing it, due east.

Keeping on long after the sun had sunk to rest and it was night again, he at length saw the lake gleaming faintly through the trees ahead of him.