s mouth, with force enough to
push his teeth down his throat. A lamp burned low in the room. Whitey
saw Mrs. Steele bending over him. Her face was ashen with fear. Her
eyes, bulging from her head, looked to Whitey to be the size of saucers.
Whitey struggled vainly in her clutch.

"They're going to kill my husband!" she gasped. "Go, go to your father's
ranch. Get the vigilantes. Bring them here quick, for God's sake!
They'll murder him, they'll murder him!"

She dragged Whitey from the bed and, half pulling him behind her, groped
her way to the side door of the ranch house and into the blackness of
the night. Tied to a bush, by a hackamore, was an iron-gray colt, the
fastest on the ranch. After that night's work he was known to be the
fastest in that part of the country.

Mrs. Steele gave the half-awakened Whitey a "foot up" upon the pony,
untied the hackamore, and he was gone. Fortunately for Whitey the horse
was turned in the right direction. That pony had been wanting to run
ever since he was born. This was the first time he ever had had a
chance, and he sure took advantage of it.

Back toward the men's quarters the night was fractured by sounds like
those of a healthy young riot. These meant nothing to Whitey, nor did
the pung! pung! of bullets, when he started, or rather when the colt
started. Perhaps the men were shooting wide, or perhaps the pony was
going so fast the bullets couldn't catch him. Be it said for the
threshers they didn't know they were shooting at a boy.

You will admit that being wakened from a sound sleep, shot on to the
back of an almost wild colt, and borne across a dark prairie at
lightning speed does not tend to make one think clearly. Whitey had only
one lucid thought during that ride. If any cowpunchers mistook his
white-clad figure for a ghost, they couldn't shoot him--he was going
too fast. In a vague way he was thankful for this.

The distance was fourteen miles, and it seemed to Whitey as though he
made it in thirteen jumps. When the pony arrived at the Bar O Ranch, he
still had the boy with him. And when Whitey pulled up the restless colt,
and roused the slumbering household, he had another sensation coming,
for his father was there.

Mr. Sherwood had intended his coming to the ranch that day as a
surprise, and it was. And he had had a surprise coming to him. He had
laughed when Bill Jordan told him how he was hazing Whitey. Then Walt
Lampson, of the Star Circle, had arrived wit