"Well," concluded Bob, "I'm enough of a sleuth to see that that barefoot
horse had a rider and wasn't just looking pasture. No animal in its
senses would hike uphill and then hike down again, or wade belly deep up
a stream."
Puzzling over this mystery, he again took his way down the trail. He
found it easy to follow, for it had been considerably travelled. In some
places the brush had been cut back to open easier passage. Examining
these cuttings, Bob found their raw ends only slightly weathered. All
this might have been done by the men who had staked the mineral claims,
to be sure, but even then Bob found it difficult to reconcile all the
facts. In the first place, the trail had indubitably been much used
since the time the claims were staked. In the second place, if the
prospector had wished to conceal anything, it should have been the fact
of his going to the Basin at all, not his whereabouts after arriving
there. In other words, if desiring to keep his presence secret, he would
have blinded the _beginning_ of the trail rather than its end.
He kept a sharp lookout. Near the entrance to the canon he managed to
discover another clear print of the barefoot horse, but headed the other
way.
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