lf an hour later. "It's not so easy to get away with
that slow insolence of his while he's wearing that forgit-me-not young
Beaudry handed him in the mix-up."

"Sort of spoils the toutensemble, as that young Melrose tenderfoot used
to say--kinder as if a bald-haided guy was playing Romeo and had lost
his wig in the shuffle," agreed Dave.

By the middle of the forenoon they were well up in the headwaters of
the two creeks they were to work. Charlton divided the party so as to
cover both watersheds as they swept slowly down. Roy was on the
extreme right of those working Del Oro.

It was a rough country, with wooded draws cached in unexpected pockets
of the hills. Here a man might lie safely on one of a hundred ledges
while the pursuit drove past within fifty feet of him. As Roy's pinto
clambered up and down the steep hills, he recalled the advice of Dave
to ride a buckskin "that melts into the atmosphere like a patch of
bunch grass." He wished he had taken that advice. A man looking for
revenge could crouch in the chaparral and with a crook of his finger
send winged death at his enemy. A twig crackling under the hoof of his
horse more than once sent an electric shock through his pulses. The
crash of a bear through the brush seemed to stop the beating of his
heart.

Charlton had made a mistake in putting Beaudry on the extreme right of
the drive. The number of men combing the two creeks was not enough to
permit close contact. Sometimes a rider was within hail of his
neighbor. More often he was not. Roy, unused to following the rodeo,
was deflected by the topography of the ridge so far to the right that
he lost touch with the rest.

By the middle of the afternoon he had to confess to himself with
chagrin that he did not even know how to reach Del Oro. While he had
been riding the rough wooded ridge above, the creek had probably made a
sharp turn to the left. Must he go back the way he had come? Or could
he cut across country to it? It was humiliating that he could not even
follow a small river without losing the stream and himself. He could
vision the cold sneer of Charlton when he failed to appear at the night
rendezvous. Even his friends would be annoyed at such helplessness.

After an hour's vain search he was more deeply tangled in the web of
hills. He was no longer even sure how to get down from them into the
lower reaches of country toward which he was aiming.

While he hesitated on a ridge