hope invested a good hour in parking his car out of view and finding a vantage point where he could carry out the kind of recce the buster and the treatment would make a move on it was from a thicket of trees on a rise across the unsealed road running by its north corner that he sketched the ranchs layout and jotted down number plates of cars that came and went and the descriptions of anyone that side of the whitewashed fences from the jockeys exercising the dozen or so racehorses in stable to the fashionably dressed men and women who came congregating on the ranch houses patio , smoking and sipping drinks in tall glasses with wide wicker chairs to sit on .