The cabin where the Beams had lived—or had claimed they lived—was a fallen ruin, crushed by snow. Tappan saw other signs of a severe winter and heavy snowfall. No horse or cattle tracks showed in the trails.
To his amaze his camp was much as he had left it. The stone fireplace, the iron pots, appeared to be in the same places. The boxes that had held his supplies were lying here and there. And his canvas tarpaulin, little the worse for wear of the elements, lay on the ground under the pine where he had slept. If any man had visited this camp in a year he had left no sign of it.
Suddenly Tappan espied a hoof track in the dust. A small track—almost oval in shape—fresh! Tappan thrilled through all his being.
“Jenet’s track, so help me God!” he murmured.
He found more of them, made that morning. And, keen now as never before on her trail, he set out to find her. The tracks led up the canyon. Tappan came out into a little grassy clearing, and there stood Jenet, as he had seen her thousands of times. She had both long ears up high. She seemed to stare out of that meek, gray face. And then one of the long ears flopped over and drooped. Such perhaps was the expression of her recognition.
Tappan strode up to her.
“Jenet—old girl—you hung round camp—waitin’ for me, didn’t you?” he said, huskily, and his big hands fondled her long ears.
Yes, she had waited. She, too, had grown old. She was gray. The winter of that year had been hard. What had she lived on when the snow lay so deep? There were lion scratches on her back, and scars on her legs. She had fought for her life.
“Jenet, a man can never always tell about a burro,” said Tappan. “I trained you to hang round camp an’ wait till I came back. … ‘Tappan’s burro,’ the desert rats used to say! An’ they’d laugh when I bragged how you’d stick to me where most men would quit. But brag as I did, I never knew you, Jenet. An’ I left you—an’ forgot. Jenet, it takes a human bein’—a man—a woman—to be faithless. An’ it takes a dog or a horse or a burro to be great. … Beasts? I wonder now. … Well, old pard, we’re goin’ down the trail together, an’ from this day on Tappan begins to pay his debt.”
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