y himself and the pony on the prairie sod. He had
not the slightest idea how far he had come, and there crept into his
mind a sort of dread.

He pulled Spraddle down to a walk, and looked about him. Behind him
there was no trace of the cow camp, nothing but the everlasting rise and
fall of the prairie.

But ahead was the ragged line of the blue mountains. These he knew to be
the Wichita Mountains, for, although he had never seen them before, he
had heard the boys talking about them in camp.

Then he saw the coyote on a hill a little ways ahead, looking at him in
the most aggravating way. The coyote's lips were curled back from his
teeth in a contemptuous sort of a smile, it seemed to Dick, and as he
started forward again the coyote threw up its head and actually laughed
at him.

That settled it with Dick. No coyote that ever trotted the plains could
laugh at him, but as this thought came to him he felt the dread of being
lost on the prairie, or even having to stay alone in this waste all
night.

Dick had heard the boys talk of the danger of being alone at night, for
there were wolves and other animals that would daunt a man, to say
nothing of a small boy.

He thought he would follow the coyote only long enough to get another
shot at him, and then retrace his way back to the camp. By putting
Spraddle through his paces he ought to be able to reach it before dark.

So he set forth again in the wake of the coyote, which was becoming more
and more aggravating every minute. Suddenly the coyote disappeared
altogether. It had done this before when it had gone down into the
trough between two of the great, rolling swales of the prairie, but
always it had come into sight again in a few minutes.

This time, however, it did not, and Dick wondered why.

In a few minutes he understood why, for he found himself at the edge of
a coulee which had been washed deep by the storms of many winters.

Dick looked up and down the coulee for the wolf, and saw a form, gray
and lithe, slinking among the bowlders with which it was filled. Dick
forced Spraddle down the steep bank of the coulee, and was soon at the
bottom.

Hastily he set after the coyote, but suddenly stopped, for a man stepped
from behind a shoulder of rock and clay and caught his bridle.

Spraddle stopped so quickly that Dick was almost unseated. But he soon
recovered himself, and stared in amazement at the man who had thus
stopped him.

He was an Indian.

Dick