dropped his hold and sprang to one side while the horses dashed on
and tore round the projecting corner of rock, the buggy slewing wildly
after them.

Waldo Kean stood an instant with clenched hands and crimson face, a
straight welt standing out white and angry across his cheek.
Then,--"Pooh! he muttered, I'm going to college all the same!"--and he
picked up his hat which the horses had trampled out of shape, shouldered
his pack and strode on down the pass. His cheek was smarting with pain,
but he was hardly aware of that; there was a yawning rip in the arm-hole
of his coat, but that was of still less consequence. He had all he could
do to attend to the conflicting emotions of the moment; the sense of
outraged dignity contending, not very successfully, with a lively
concern for the fate of those people he had tried to rescue. He thought
it more than likely that they would both get killed, for the horses
were quite unmanageable when they disappeared around the corner, and he
remembered an ugly bit of road just above that point. He was not a
little disgusted with himself when he caught himself hoping that they
might get out of the scrape alive. Well, if he could not "stay mad"
longer than that, he told himself, he might as well forget the whole
business and be on the look-out for specimens.

Meanwhile the pass was getting grander every moment; the brook was
working its way deeper below the level of the road, while here and there
in this sombre defile a splash of yellow aspen gleamed like living gold
on the face of the precipice. The wild and beautiful gorge interested
him in spite of himself; it disengaged his thoughts alike from his
personal grievance, and from his dissatisfied contemplation of his own
lack of proper vindictiveness. There was nothing grand like this in the
neighborhood of the ranch. It was more like his father's description of
the "Flume" and the "Notch," those natural wonders of the White Hills
which Waldo Kean the elder liked to talk about. "When I was a boy over
in New Hampshire," he used to say; and to the children it seemed as if
"over in New Hampshire" could not be more than a day's journey from the
ranch.

[Illustration: "THE WILD AND BEAUTIFUL GORGE."]

"When I was a boy over in New Hampshire," he would say, "I got it into
my head that if I could only get away to a new place I sh'd get to be
something big; and the farther away I got, the bigger I expected to be.
Colorado was a territory then,