“My guess is these men have trained some to do one thing, some another.” John kept feeding the birds. “You let them nest somewhere for a while, and they claim it as their home, then you take them a great distance away and release them. They’ll fly back and forth. I’m not sure of all the training because I never did that part, but once they are trained, you can tie a small message to their legs. They can fly a message as far as a hundred miles, and they can make the trips more than once a day, depending on how far they have to travel. I spent a lot of time at sea, and we could take the pigeons and send messages to headquarters. No matter where the ship went to that pigeon would go home to headquarters.”

Molly came to his side and started helping toss handfuls of grain in the coop. “Six of them. You think we can follow them?”

“Yes, I hope so, if we release one at a time. Watch it, do our best to keep up, then if we lose it, we release another one. Most likely there are pigeons in Kingston’s house, too. We’ll need to go to Casper and take care of them.”

“Falcon can probably figure out which direction Hawkins headed.”

Falcon came in just as Wyatt offered his services, Cheyenne right behind. “We’ll get started searching out which tracks are Hawkins’s.”

The sheriff looked skeptically at the pigeons and said, “I’m a fair hand at tracking. I’ll help find Hawkins’s trail.”

“Let’s take all of the birds. We even have something to haul them in.” John pointed to a small wooden crate in one corner. “We’ll let the sheriff and Falcon lead us down Hawkins’s trail for as long as we can follow it, then let one pigeon go and just see. If they all head straight for Casper, then I don’t suppose they’ll be of any use. But if some go another direction, we’ll follow until we lose sight of it. If there are enough pigeons, we can keep releasing them until we reach our man.”

“Wyatt, is there a wagon here?” Falcon asked. “We can haul the crate more easily in that. If he’s got horses and livestock and he’s on the run, we’ll need to tend his critters.”

“He’s got chickens and a few pigs besides the horses and cattle. It doesn’t look like there’s a hired man on the place. Either they left when they realized Hawkins did, or he fired them all and abandoned his animals to starve in their pens.” Wyatt scowled. “I’ll see to a wagon, and Hawkins favors a chestnut mare. I should be able to tell if he chose that horse and can pick out her tracks.”