ntain, and stood
champing at the door while she went in to get something to eat. When
she brought out a shining new side saddle he looked suspiciously at
the strange thing, but he made no serious objection as she fastened it
on. Ruth herself, when she had buckled it tight, stood looking
doubtfully at it. A side saddle was as new to her as it was to the
horse. She had bought it on her way home the other day, as a
concession to the fact that she was now a young lady who could no
longer go stampeding over the hills on a bare-backed horse.

She mounted easily, but Brom Bones, seeming to know in the way of his
kind that she was uneasy and uncomfortable, began at once to act
badly. His intention seemed to be to walk into the open well on his
hind feet. The girl caught a short hold on her lines and cut him
sharply across the ear. He wheeled on two feet and bolted for the
hill, clearing the woodshed by mere inches.

The path led straight up to the top of the slope. Ruth did not try to
hold him. The sooner he ran the conceit out of himself, she thought,
the better.

He hurled himself down the other slope, past the pool, and into the
trail which Jeffrey had taken yesterday. It was break-neck riding, in
a strange saddle. But the girl's anxiety rose with the excitement of
the horse's wild rush, so that when they reached the top of the divide
where she had last seen Jeffrey it was the horse and not the girl that
was ready to settle down to a sober and safer pace.

Her common sense told her that she was probably foolish; that Jeffrey
had merely stayed over night somewhere and that she would meet him on
the way. But another and a subtler sense kept whispering to her to
hurry on, that she was needed, that the good name, if not the life, of
the boy she loved was in danger!

She had found out from Mrs. Whiting just who were the men whom Jeffrey
had gone to see. But she did not know how she could dash up to their
doors and demand to know where he was. It was eleven miles up the
stony trail that followed Wilbur's Fork, and the girl's nerves now
keyed up to expect she knew not what jangled at every turn of the
road. Jeffrey had meant to come straight back this way to her. That he
had not done so meant that _something_ had stopped him on the way.
What was it?

On one side the trail was flanked by giant hemlocks and the underbrush
was grown into an impenetrable wall. On the other it ran sheer along
the edge of Wilbur's Fork, a rock-bo