es widened a trifle in surprise.

Skirts to the tops of her shoes betrayed her a woman. She limped
painfully, so that Ford immediately pictured to himself puckered
eyebrows and lips pressed tightly together. "And I'll bet she's crying,
too," he summed up aloud. While he was speaking, she stumbled and fell
headlong.

When he saw that she made no attempt to rise, but lay still just as she
had fallen, Ford looked no longer for an easy crossing. He glanced up
and down the washout, saw no more promising point than where he was,
wheeled and rode back twenty yards or so, turned and drove deep his
spurs.

It was a nasty jump, and he knew it all along. When Rambler rose gamely
to it, with tensed muscles and forefeet flung forward to catch the bank
beyond, he knew it better. And when, after a sickening minute of
frenzied scrambling at the crumbling edge, they slid helplessly to the
bottom, he cursed his idiocy for ever attempting it.

Rambler got up with a pronounced limp, but Ford had thrown himself from
the saddle and escaped with nothing worse than a skinned elbow. They
were penned, however, in a box-like gully ten feet deep, and there was
nothing to do but follow it to where they might climb out. Ford was
worried about the girl, and made a futile attempt to stand in the saddle
and from there climb up to the level. But Rambler, lame as he was,
plunged so that Ford finally gave it up and started down the gulch,
leading Rambler by the reins.

There were many sharp turns and temper-trying windings, and though it
narrowed in many places so that there was barely room for them to pass,
it never grew shallower; indeed, it grew always deeper; and then,
without any warning, it stopped abruptly upon a coulee's rim, with
jumbled rocks and between them a sheer descent to the slope below. Ford
guessed then that he was boxed up in one of the main waterways of the
foot-hills he had been skirting for the past hour or so, and that he
should have ridden up the gulch instead of down it.

He turned, though the place was so narrow that Rambler's four feet
almost touched one another and his rump scraped the bank, as Ford pulled
him round, and retraced his steps. It was too rough for riding, even if
he had not wanted to save the horse, and he had no idea how far he must
go before he could get out. Ford, at that time, was not particularly
cheerful.

He must have gone a mile and more before he reached the point where, by
hard scrambling, he a