“Luke!” Bud Jenkins yelled. “Over here!” He stepped down from the saddle to take a closer look, then he waited for his partner to catch up to him. They had found the girl’s tracks leading into the water, so they had crossed over and found her tracks where she came out on that side. But she had been more careful from that point on. When Luke Ivey pulled his horse up beside his partner’s, Bud pointed to a broken branch between two berry bushes growing on the edge of a low bluff. “That’s what she did,” he said, looking over the low bluff at the water below. “She pushed through this here bush and jumped in the river, thought we wouldn’t see no tracks, so we wouldn’t know she went back across the river. She’s smart, but she ain’t as smart as me and you, right, Luke?”

“I ’spect not,” Luke said. “Come on.” He wheeled his horse and loped past the bluff to a point where the bank was not so steep and entered the water there. When Bud caught up to him on the other side, he said, “You look upstream, I’ll look downstream. We oughta find some tracks where she came out.” As he expected, it wasn’t long before he discovered Winter Flower’s tracks where she had come out of the water. “Down here, Bud,” he called out, and waited for him. When he caught up to him, Luke chuckled and pointed to the footprints coming out of the river. “Looks like she tried to brush her tracks out with a branch or somethin’. I reckon she was in too big a hurry to do a good job. Let’s see which way she ran.”

They scouted the riverbank for only a short while before finding a single footprint heading downstream. “She can’t be far,” Bud speculated. “She mighta found her a place to hole up and hide. Best keep a sharp eye.” They went on foot, leading their horses, so as not to miss any other signs of her escape route, and after a distance of about fifty yards, they discovered another footprint in the moss at the base of a cottonwood tree. “She’s runnin’ straight down the river,” he said with a laugh. “Reckon she’s figurin’ on runnin’ all the way back home?” They continued along the river until Bud suddenly stopped and exclaimed, “Whoa!” When Luke came up beside him, Bud pointed to a column of smoke drifting up through the trees ahead.

“What the hell?” Luke puzzled, “You reckon she stopped to build a fire?”