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 that the men were down here somewhere." Miss Allen, you see, came pretty close to the truth with her guess.