, as she no doubt
knew the shortest way to the nearest ranch, they at least make a start
in that direction.

"How?" asked the girl, staring up at him from where she sat beside the
rose bushes.

"By walking, I suppose--unless you expect me to carry you." Ford's tone
was not in any degree affable.

"I fancy it would be asking too great a favor to suggest that you catch
my horse for me?"

Ford dropped Rambler's reins and turned to her, irritated to the point
where he felt a distinct desire to shake her.

"I'd far rather catch your horse, even if I had to haze him all over
the country, than carry you," he stated bluntly.

"Yes. I suspected that much." She had plucked a red seed-ball off the
bush nearest her and was nibbling daintily the sweet pulp off the
outside.

"Where is the horse?" Ford was holding himself rigidly hack from an
outburst of temper.

"Oh, I don't know, I'm sure." She picked another seed-ball and began
upon it. "He should be somewhere around, unless he has taken a notion to
go home."

Ford said something under his breath and untied his rope from the
saddle. He knew about where the horse had been feeding when he saw him,
and he judged that it would naturally graze in the direction of
home--which would probably be somewhere off to the southeast, since the
trail ran more or less in that direction. Without a word to the girl, or
a glance toward her, he started up the hill, hoping to get his bearings
and a sight of the horse from the top. He could not remember when he had
been so angry with a woman. "If she was a man," he gritted as he
climbed, "I'd give her a thrashing or leave her out there, just as she
deserves. That's the worst of dealing with a woman--she can always hand
it to you, and you've got to give her a grin and thank-you, because she
ain't a man."

He glanced back, then, and saw her sitting with her head dropped forward
upon her hands. There was something infinitely pitiful and lonely in her
attitude, and he knitted his brows over the contrast between it and her
manner when he left her. "I don't suppose a woman knows, herself, what
she means, half the time," he hazarded impatiently. "She certainly
didn't have any excuse for throwing it into me the way she did; maybe
she's sorry for it now."

After that his anger cooled imperceptibly, and he hurried a little
faster because the day was waning with the chill haste of mid-autumn,
and he recalled what she had said at first about being af