Baby Girl, go to it!" he chuckled; "you've got to learn!
Sooner or later you'll find out it can't be done!" He rode limply,
loosely, low in the saddle, and while he made no effort to urge the
filly into greater frenzy he did not try in any way to prevent her
bucking her hardest in, the futile attempts to hurl him off her back.

The second time the outlaw mare came to the gate she whirled and dashed
through the opening, out of the corral, across the open space, past the
corner of the front-yard fence and along the road that led up to the
bench and toward Eagle Butte. Captain Jack trotted around the corral
once, then followed at a long, swinging gallop.

The noise of the filly bucking inside the corral reached the ears of the
dancers in the big room at the house.

"What in thunderation's that commotion?" Old Heck exclaimed, starting
up--he and Ophelia had just finished a two-step and Skinny was winding
the graphophone to play his favorite, the alluring _La Paloma_.

There was an instant's pause, then a rush for the door.

Carolyn June reached the porch just in time to see the Gold Dust
maverick "hitting the breeze"--careering madly, wildly pitching as she
ran past the opening in front of the house and up the road out on the
bench. It was almost as though a phantom horse and rider had passed
before her sight.

"Lord! Look at them go!" Charley cried admiringly.

At first the girl had not recognized the outlaw mare or her rider.

"Who--what--is it?" she asked Chuck, who was standing beside her.

Bert answered for Chuck. "It's that darn-fool Ramblin' Kid--he's riding
the Gold Dust maverick!" he said. "Ain't that just like the blamed
idiot--to go and ride that filly to-night?"

"Aw, he's liable to do anything," Charley commented, "he's--"

Before the sentence was finished the beautiful mare and her apparently
careless rider, with Captain Jack a hundred yards behind, disappeared
over the brink of the bench and in the silence that followed the group
on the porch heard only the distant thudding of hoofs beating an ever
fainter tattoo through the calm, moonlit night.

Carolyn June went back into the house with conflicting emotions surging
through her heart. She believed she knew why the Ramblin' Kid had
elected to ride the outlaw filly to-night. But her thoughts she kept to
herself.

For an hour longer the dance continued. But not with the spirit of
earlier in the evening. The interruption took something of the eager