The Texan stirred uneasily. Vaguely, he sensed that something was wrong. His head ached horribly but he didn't trouble to open his eyes. He was in the corral lying cramped against the fence where the Red King had thrown him, and with bared teeth, and forefeet pawing the air, the Red King was coming toward him. Another moment and those terrible hoofs would be striking, cutting, trampling him into the trodden dirt of the corral. Why didn't someone haze him off? Would they sit there on the fence and see him killed? "Whoa, boy—Whoa!" In vain he struggled to raise an arm—it was held fast, and his legs were pinned to the ground by a weight! He struggled violently, his eyes flew open and—there was no Red King, no corral—only a grassed slope strewn with rocks against one of which his head rested. But why was he tied? With great effort he rolled over. The weight that held his legs shifted, and he found that one of his arms was free. He sat up and stared, and instantly recollection of the events of the night, brutally vivid, crowded his brain. There was no slow, painful tracing step by step, of the happenings of the past twelve hours. The whole catenation in proper sequence presented itself in one all-embracing vision—a scene painted on canvas, rather than the logical continuity of a screen picture.

The unconscious form of the girl lay across his legs. Her temple, and part of her cheek that lay within range of his vision were white with the pallor of death, and the hand that stretched upward toward his own, showed blue and swollen from the effect of the tightly knotted scarf. Swiftly the man untied the knots, and staggering to his feet, raised the limp form and half-carried, half-dragged it to a tiny plateau higher up the slope. Very gently he laid the girl on the grass, loosened her shirt at the throat, and removed her wet boots. Her hands and feet were ice cold, and he chafed them vigorously. Gradually, under the rubbing the sluggish blood flowed. The blue look faded from her hand and a slight tinge of colour crept into her cheeks. With a sigh of relief, the Texan grasped her by the shoulder and shook her roughly. After a few moments her eyelids fluttered slightly, and her lips moved. The shaking continued, and he bent to catch the muttered words:

"Win——"

"Yeh, Win'll be 'long, directly. Come, wake up!"

"Win—dear—I'm—so—sleepy."

She was asleep again as the words left her lips and the man, squatting on his heels, nodded approval. "That's what I wanted to know—that she ain't drowned. If there'd been any water in her lungs she'd have coughed."

He stood up and surveyed his surroundings. At the water's edge, not a hundred feet below the spot where the horse had dragged them against the rocks, the flat-boat lay heavily aground. Relieved of its burden, it had been caught in the slowly revolving back current that circled the tiny bay, and had drifted ashore. Removing the scarf from his wrist, he knotted it into place and descended to the boat where he fished his hat from the half-filled hull. The handle of the ax caught his eye and searching his pockets, he examined his supply of matches, and cast the worthless sticks from him with an oath: "Heads plumb soaked off, or I could build her a fire!"

As he ascended the bank the sun just topped the rim of the bench. Its rays felt grateful to the chilled man as he stood looking down at the sleeping girl. "It'll dry her, an' warm her up, while I'm huntin' that damn cayuse," he muttered. "The quicker she gets to some ranch house, the better it'll be. I wish I knew where I'm at."

Once more he descended to the water's edge, and searched the ground. It was but the work of a moment to pick up the trail of the galloping horse, and he followed it up the coulee, making his way gingerly in his stockinged feet among the loose stones and patches of prickly pears. "Wish I'd left my boots in the boat, but I figured old Powder Face would stop when he got to shore instead of smashin' us again' the rocks an' lightin' out like the devil was after him—he's old enough to know better. An' I wonder how in hell she come to be ridin' him? Powder Face is one of Dad's own special horses."

The coulee wound interminably. The cowboy glanced at his feet where a toe protruded from a hole in his sock, and seating himself on a boulder he removed the socks and crammed them into his pocket. "Wouldn't be nothin' left of 'em but legs in a little bit," he grumbled, and instinctively felt for his tobacco and papers. He scowled at the soggy mass and replaced them. "Ain't got a match even if I did dry the tobacco. I sure feel like I'd died an' went to hell!"

He continued along the coulee limping painfully across stretches of sharp stones and avoiding the innumerable patches of prickly pears with which the floor of the valley was dotted. Rounding a sharp spur of rock that protruded into the ravine, he halted abruptly and stared at his boots which lay directly in his path. He grinned as he examined the broken thong. "I've be'n cussin' busted pack-strings all my life," he muttered, "but this particular string has wiped out the whole score again' 'em." Removing his leather chaps, he seated himself, drew on his socks, and inserted a foot into a boot. In vain he pulled and tugged at the straps. The wet leather gripped the damp sock like a vise. He stood up and stamped and pulled but the foot stuck fast at the ankle of the boot. Withdrawing the foot, he fished in his hip pocket and withdrew a thin piece of soap from the folds of a red cotton handkerchief. Once again he sat down and proceeded to rub the soap thickly upon the heels and insteps of his socks and inside of his boots, whereupon, after much pulling and stamping, he stood properly shod and drew on his chaps.

A short distance farther on, a cattle trail zigzagged down the steep side of the coulee. The Texan paused at the foot of it. "Reckon I'll just climb up onto the bank an' take a look around. With that rope trailin' along from the saddle horn, that damn cayuse might run his fool head off."

From the rim of the coulee, the man gazed about him, searching for a familiar landmark. A quarter of a mile away, a conical butte rose to a height of a hundred feet above the level of the broken plain, and the Texan walked over and laboriously climbed its steep side. He sank down upon the topmost pinnacle and studied the country minutely. "Just below the edge of the bad lands," he muttered. "The Little Rockies loom up plain, an' the Bear Paws an' Judiths look kind of dim. I'm way off my range down here. This part of the country don't look like it had none too thick of a population." In vain his eyes swept the vast expanse of plain for the sight of a ranch house. He rose in disgust. "I've got to find that damn cayuse an' get her out of this, somehow." As he was about to begin the descent his eye caught a thin thread of smoke that rose, apparently from a coulee some three or four miles to the eastward. "Maybe some nester's place, or maybe only an' Injun camp, but whatever it is, my best bet is to hit for it. I might be all day trailin' Powder Face. Whoever it is, they'll have a horse or two, an' believe me, they'll part with 'em." He scrambled quickly down to the bench and started in the direction of the smoke, and as he walked, he removed the six-gun from its holster and after wiping it carefully, made sure that it was in working condition.

The Texan's course lay "crossways of the country," that is, in order to reach his objective he must needs cross all the innumerable coulees and branches that found their way to the Missouri. And as he had not travelled far back from the river these coulees were deep and their steep sides taxed his endurance to the utmost. At the bottom of each coulee he drank sparingly of the bitter alkali water, and wet the bandage about his throbbing head. After each climb he was forced to rest. A walk of three or four miles in high-heeled riding boots assumes the proportions of a real journey, even under the most favourable circumstances, but with the precipitous descents, the steep climbs, and the alkali flats between the coulees, which in dry weather are dazzling white, and hard and level as a floor, now merely grey greasy beds of slime into which he sank to the ankles at each step, the trip proved a nightmare of torture.

At the end of an hour he figured that he had covered half the distance. He was plodding doggedly, every muscle aching from the unaccustomed strain. His feet, which burned and itched where the irritating soap rubbed into his skin, had swollen until the boots held them in a vise-like grip of torture. At each step he lifted pounds of glue-like mud which clung to the legs of his leather chaps in a thick grey smear. And each step was a separate, conscious, painful effort, that required a concentration of will to consummate.

And so he plodded, this Texan, who would have cursed the petty mishap of an ill-thrown loop to the imminent damnation of his soul, enduring the physical torture in stoic silence. Once or twice he smiled grimly, the cynical smile that added years to the boyish face. "When I see her safe at some ranch, I'll beat it," he muttered thickly. "I'll go somewhere an' finish my jamboree an' then I'll hit fer some fresh range." To his surprise he suddenly found that the mere thought of whisky was nauseating to him. His memory took him back to a college town in his native State. "It used to be that way," he grinned, "when I'd get soused, I couldn't look at a drink for a week. I reckon stayin' off of it for a whole year has about set me back where I started."

He half-climbed, half-fell down the steep side of a coulee and dipped his aching head in the cool water at the bottom. With a stick he scraped the thick smear of grey mud from his chaps and boots, and washed them in the creek. He rose to his feet and stood looking down into a clear little pool. "By God, I can't go—like that!" he said aloud. "I've got to stay an' face Win! I've got to know that he don't think there's anything—wrong—with her!"

Instead of climbing the opposite slope, he followed down the coulee, for he had seen from the edge that it led into a creek valley of considerable width, above the rim of which rose the thin grey plume of smoke. Near the mouth of the coulee he crawled through a wire fence. "First time a nester's fence ever looked good to me," he grinned, and at a shallow pool, paused to remove the last trace of mud from his chaps, wash his face and hands, box his hat into the proper peak, and jerk the brilliant scarf into place.

"She can rest up here till I find Win," he said aloud, and stepped into the valley, trying not to limp as he picked his way among the scattered rocks. "Sheep outfit," he muttered, as he noted the close-cropped grass, and the stacked panels of a lambing pen. Then, rounding a thicket of scrub willows, he came suddenly upon the outfit, itself.

He halted abruptly, as his eyes took in every detail of the scene. A little dirt roofed cabin of logs, a rambling straw thatched sheep shed, a small log barn, and a pole corral in which two horses dozed dreamily. The haystacks were behind the barn, and even as he looked, a generous forkful of hay rolled over the top of the corral fence, and the horses crossed over and thrust their muzzles into its fragrant depths. A half-dozen weak old ewes snipped half-heartedly at the short buffalo grass, and three or four young lambs frisked awkwardly about the door-yard on their ungainly legs.

Another forkful of hay rolled over the corral fence, and making his way around the barn, the Texan came abruptly face to face with Miss Janet McWhorter. The girl stood, pitchfork in hand, upon a ledge of the half-depleted haystack and surveyed him calmly, as a startled expression swiftly faded from her large, blue-black eyes. "Well you're the second one this morning; what do you want?"

The Texan noticed that the voice was rich, with low throaty tones and also he noticed that it held a repellent note. There was veiled hostility—even contempt in the peculiar emphasis of the "you." He swept the Stetson from his head: "I'm afoot," he answered, simply, "I'd like to borrow a horse."

The girl jabbed the fork into the hay, gathered her skirts about her, and slipped gracefully from the stack. She walked over and stood directly before him. "This is McWhorter's outfit," she announced, as if the statement were a good and sufficient answer to his plea.

The cowboy looking straight into the blue-black eyes, detected a faint gleam of surprise in their depths, that her statement apparently meant nothing to him. He smiled: "Benton's my name—Tex Benton, range foreman of the Y Bar. And, is this Mrs. McWhorter?"

"The Y Bar!" exclaimed the girl, and Tex noticed that the gleam and surprise hardened into a glance of open skepticism. "Who owns the Y Bar, now?"

"Same man that's owned it for the last twenty years—Mr. Colston."

"You must know him pretty well if you're his foreman?"

"Tolerable," answered the man, "I've been with him most every day for a year."

A swift smile curved the red lips—a smile that hinted of craft rather than levity. "I wonder what's worrying him most, nowadays—Mr. Colston, I mean."

"Worryin' him?" The Texan's eyes twinkled. "Well, a man runnin' an outfit like the Y Bar has got plenty on his mind, but the only thing that right down worries him is the hair on his head—an' just between you an' me, he ain't goin' to have to worry long."

The air of reserve—of veiled hostility dropped from the girl like a mask, and she laughed—a spontaneous outburst of mirth that kindled new lights in the blue-black eyes, and caused a fanlike array of little wrinkles to radiate from their corners: "I'll answer your question now," she said. "I'm Mrs. Nobody, thank you—I'm Janet McWhorter. But what are you doing on this side of the river? And how's Mr. Colston?"

"He's just the finest ever," replied the cowboy, and the girl was quick to note the deep feeling behind the words. "An' I—two of us—were tryin' to cross on the Long Bill's ferry from Timber City, an' the drift piled up again' us so we had to cut the cable, an' we got throw'd into shore against the bench three or four miles above here."

"Where's your friend? Is he hurt?" Her eyes rested with a puzzled expression upon the edge of the white bandage that showed beneath the brim of his hat.

The Texan shook his head: "No, not hurt I reckon. Just plumb wore out, an' layin' asleep on the bank. I've got to go back."

"You'll need two horses."

The man shook his head: "No, only one. We had our horses with us. We lost one in the river, an' the other pulled us ashore, an' then beat it up the coulee. I can catch him up all right, if I can get holt of a horse."

"Of course you can have a horse! But, you must eat first——"

"I can't stop. There'll be time for that later. I'm goin' to bring—my friend back here."

"Of course you're going to bring him back here! But you are about all in yourself. Three or four miles through the mud and across the coulees in high-heeled boots, and with your head hurt, and sopping wet, and no breakfast, and—I bet you haven't even had a smoke! Come on, you can eat a bite while I fix up something for your friend, and then you can tackle some of Dad's tobacco. I guess it's awful strong but it will make smoke—clouds of it!"

She turned and led the way to the house and as the Texan followed his eyes rested with a suddenly awakened interest upon the girl. "Curious she'd think of me not havin' a smoke," he thought, as his glance strayed from the shapely ankles to the well-rounded forearms from which the sleeves of her grey flannel shirt had been rolled back, and then to the mass of jet black hair that lay coiled in thick braids upon her head. He was conscious that a feeling of contentment—a certain warm glow of well-being pervaded him, and he wondered vaguely why this should be.

"Come right on in," she called over her shoulder as she entered the door. "I'll have things ready in a jiffy?" As she spoke, she slid a lid from the top of the stove, jammed in a stick of firewood, set the coffee-pot directly on to the fire, and placed a frying pan beside it. From a nail she took a slab of bacon and sliced it rapidly. In the doorway the Texan stood watching, in open admiration, the swift, sure precision of her every move. She glanced up, a slice of bacon held above the pan, and their eyes met. During a long moment of silence the man's heart beat wildly. The girl's eyes dropped suddenly: "Crisp, or limber?" she asked, and to the cowboy's ears, the voice sounded even richer and deeper of tone than before.

"Limber, please." His own words seemed to boom harshly, and he was conscious that he was blushing to the ears.

The girl laid the strips side by side in the pan and crossed swiftly to a cupboard. The next moment she was pouring something from a bottle into a glass. She returned the bottle and, passing around the table, extended the half-filled tumbler. The liquid in it was brown, and to the man's nostrils came the rich bouquet of good whisky. He extended his hand, then let it drop to his side.

"No, thanks," he said, "none for me."

She regarded him in frank surprise. "You don't drink?" she cried. "Why—oh, I'm glad! I hate the stuff! Father—sometimes—Oh, I hate it! But, a cowboy that don't drink! I thought they all drank!"

The Texan stepped to her side and, reaching for the glass, set it gently upon the table. As his hand touched hers a thrill shot through his veins, and with it came a sudden longing to take the hand in his own—to gather this girl into his arms and to hold her tight against his wildly throbbing heart. The next moment he was speaking in slow measured words. "They all do—me along with the rest. But, I ain't drinkin' now."