r in the car, the engine had slowed down. Ruth
opened her eyes; what had made her traveling companions' faces brighten
with interest? Three or four of them rushed across the aisle and pressed
their noses up against the window panes on her side of the coach. One
man threw up the car window, leaned out and shouted: "Hurrah!" A woman
waved her handkerchief.

Ruth's curiosity was aroused and she gazed languidly out her window.
Flying along the road that followed the line of the track, was a Western
pony. The horse was running like a streak, his nostrils quivering with
excitement, his feet pounding along the hard sand.

"Beat it! beat it!" cried the excited stranger. "Did anybody ever see
such riding before?" The man addressed the entire car.

Ruth could see that there was someone on the horse, running a race with
the express train. The rider was in brown and Ruth could not observe
very distinctly. She supposed that it was an Indian boy.

"That girl is a wonder!" the man exclaimed, who had been traveling next
the prim young woman from the East for four days without daring to look
straight at her. He leaned over his seat and smiled.

"Girl!" Miss Drew repeated in surprise. "Was the figure on horseback a
girl?" Ruth was quite willing to admit that she had never seen such
horsemanship in her life. The girl was perfectly graceful and at times
she leaned over to urge her pony on, or bent sideways as though she
swayed with the motion of the wind. She seemed to rest on her horse so
lightly that she added no burden to him but was like the spirit of
motion carrying him on.

The engine ahead whistled three times. The train was moving slowly,
still it was remarkable how the rider kept up with the passenger coach.

Just as the car rolled into the station, the girl on horseback flashed a
smile at the people watching her from the car windows, and Ruth had a
brief glimpse of a shaft of sunlight caught in a mass of bright, bronze
hair and a pair of radiant cheeks and eyes. Then she seized her suit
case and umbrella, slipped into her overshoes and hurried out of the
train. She had read that it rarely rained in Wyoming, except in the
spring, but she wished to run no risk of taking cold.

CHAPTER XIV.

AN UNFORTUNATE ARRIVAL.

THERE was no one on the platform when Ruth dismounted, but a tall man,
who was not looking for her. He was oddly handsome in spite of his queer
Western clothes, and Ruth wished for an instant that he m