CHAPTER XXXIX

SLEUTHING Scot was called back to Carson on official business, so that it was Hugh who entrained for Austin to join Browning on his search for evidence. In the old days of the pony express the boy rider had seen Austin a score of times. It was in the heart of a desert that stretched six hundred miles from east to west, a desert walled in by the Rockies on one side and the Sierras on the other. The town lay huddled between the sides of a cañon which ran sharply up from the Reese River valley. Houses were built every…