Swede foreman, and Pete seemed quite
at a loss what to do.

"Take him in and put him to bed," Miss Georgie commanded, turning away.
"See if he's bleeding yet, and--well, I should put a cold compress on
the wound, I think. I'll send for a doctor--but he can't get here till
nine o'clock unless you want to stand the expense of a special. And by
that time--"

Saunders moved his head a trifle, and lifted his heavy lids to look
at her, which so unnerved Miss Georgie that she turned and ran to the
office. When she had sent the message she sat drumming upon the table
while she waited for an answer.

"G-r-a-n-" her fingers had spelled when she became conscious of the
fact, flushed hotly, and folded her hands tightly together in her lap.

"The doctor will come--Hawkinson, I sent for," she announced later to
Pete, holding out the telegram. She glanced reluctantly at the wrinkled
blanket where Saunders had lain, caught a corner of her under lip
between her teeth, and, bareheaded though she was, went down the steps
and along the trail to the stable.

"I've nearly an hour before I need open the office," she said to
herself, looking at her watch. She did not say what she meant to do
with that hour, but she spent a quarter of it examining the stable and
everything in it. Especially did she search the loose, sandy soil in its
vicinity for tracks.

Finally she lifted her skirts as a woman instinctively does at a street
crossing, and struck off through the sagebrush, her eyes upon a line of
uncertain footsteps as of a drunken man reeling that way. They were not
easy to follow--or they would not have been if she had not felt certain
of the general direction which they must take. More than once she lost
sight of them for several rods, but she always picked them up farther
along. At one place she stopped, and stood perfectly still, her skirts
held back tightly with both hands, while she stared fascinatedly at a
red smear upon a broken branch of sage and the smooth-packed hollow in
the sand where he must have lain.

"He's got nerve--I'll say that much for him," she observed aloud, and
went on.

The footprints were plain where he crossed the grade road near the edge
of the bluff, but from there on it was harder to follow them because of
the great patches of black lava rock lying even with the surface of the
ground, where a dozen men might walk abreast and leave no sign that the
untrained eye, at least, could detect.

"This is a cas