there came to him a faint, far cry. He
gave a shout of relief, then listened for his answer. It did not come.
He called again, a third time, and a fourth. The wind brought back no
reply. Roy rode in the direction of the sound that had first
registered itself on his ears, stopping every minute or two to shout.
Once he fancied he heard again the voice.

Then, unexpectedly, the cry came perfectly clear, over to the right
scarcely a hundred yards. A little arroyo of quaking aspens lay
between him and the one who called. He dismounted, tied his horse to a
sapling, and pushed through the growth of young trees. Emerging from
these, he climbed the brow of the hill and looked around. Nobody was
in sight.

"Where are you?" he shouted.

"Here--in the prospect hole."

His pulses crashed. That voice--he would have known it out of a
million.

A small dirt dump on the hillside caught his eye. He ran forward to
the edge of a pit and looked down.

The haggard eyes of Beulah Rutherford were lifted to meet his.

Chapter XXII

Miss Rutherford Speaks her Mind

For the first time in over a year an itinerant preacher was to hold
services in the Huerfano Park schoolhouse. He would speak, Beulah
Rutherford knew, to a mere handful of people, and it was to mitigate
his disappointment that she rode out into the hills on the morning of
her disappearance to find an armful of columbines for decorating the
desk-pulpit. The man had written Miss Rutherford and asked her to
notify the community. She had seen that the news was carried to the
remotest ranch, but she expected for a congregation only a scatter of
patient women and restless children with three or four coffee-brown
youths in high-heeled boots on the back row to represent the sinners.

It was a brave, clean world into which she rode this summer morning.
The breeze brought to her nostrils the sweet aroma of the sage. Before
her lifted the saw-toothed range into a sky of blue sprinkled here and
there with light mackerel clouds. Blacky pranced with fire and
intelligence, eager to reach out and leave behind him the sunny miles.

Near the upper end of the park she swung up an arroyo that led to Big
Flat Top. A drawling voice stopped her.

"Oh, you, Beulah Rutherford! Where away this glad mo'ning?"

A loose-seated rider was lounging in the saddle on a little bluff fifty
yards away. His smile reminded her of a new copper kettle shining in
the sun.

"To find