he know where she was. Therefore it was positive that
she was lost!

Now, Pinky was a very intelligent pony, as was afterward proved. You
will read all about it later. But he could not know that Rose wished him
to find his way home unless she told him as much. And that Rose did not
do.

She just burst out crying, and the pony had no idea what that meant. He
turned to look at her, tossed his head and pawed with one dainty hoof.
But he did not understand of course that the girl on his back was crying
because she was lost and was afraid.

Perhaps, too, if Rose had let the bridle-reins alone Pinky would have
remembered the corral and his oats and have started back without being
told that the ranch house was the thing Rose Bunker most wanted to see.
But the little girl thought she had to guide the pony; so she grabbed up
the reins at last and said:

"Come up, Pinky! We have just got to go somewhere. Go on!"

Pinky naturally went on the way he was headed, and that chanced to be in
a direction away from Cowboy Jack's home, where the Bunkers were then
visiting. Nor did the pony bear her toward the place where the moving
picture company was at work.

They went on, and noon came, and both Pinky and the little girl were
hungry and thirsty.

Pinky smelled water--or saw it. He insisted on starting off to one side
of the narrow trail they had been following.

Rose was afraid to leave that trail, for it seemed to her that a path
along which people had ridden enough to make a deep rut in the sward
must be a path that was more or less used all the time. She expected to
meet somebody by sticking to this path, or else come to a house.

But here was a shallow stream, and Pinky insisted on trotting down to it
and wading right in.

The water was cool, and the pony cooled his feet in it as well as his
nose. He had jerked the reins out of Rose's hands when he had sunk his
nose in the water, and she had no way of controlling him.

"You bad, bad Pinky!" cried Rose, leaning down, clinging with one hand
to his mane and reached with the other hand to seize the reins. But she
could not reach them. She lost her stirrups. She slipped forward off the
saddle and upon the pony's neck.

At this Pinky was startled. He tried to scramble out of the brook. He
stepped on a stone that rolled. And then he staggered and half fell and
over his head and right into the middle of the brook flew Rose Bunker!
It was a most astonishing overturn, to say no