slope merged into another level which paralleled the buttes along the
river, and she could see for miles on the other side of the stream, a
vista of plain and hills and mountains and forest so alluring in its
virgin wildness; so vast, big, and silent a section that it awed her.

When she saw the sun swimming just above the peaks of some mountains in
the dim distance, she began to have some doubts of the wisdom of making
the trip, but she pressed on, promising herself that she would have a
brief look at the shack and the basin, and then immediately return. She
had expected to make much better time than she had made. Also, she had
not anticipated that a fifteen-mile ride would tire her so. But she
believed that it was not the ride so far, but the prospect of another
fifteen-mile ride to return, that appalled her--for she had ridden much
since her coming to the Flying W, and was rather hardened to it. In one
of his letters to her, her uncle had stated that his men often rode sixty
miles in a day, and that he remembered one ride of ninety miles, which a
cowpuncher had made with the same pony in twenty-two hours of straight
riding. He had told her that the tough little plains pony could go any
distance that its rider was able to "fork" it. She believed that, for the
little animal under her had never looked tired when she had ridden him to
the ranchhouse at the end of a hard day.

But these recollections did not console her, and she urged the pony on,
into a gallop that took her over the ground rapidly.

At last, as she was swept around a bend in the plateau, she saw spreading
beneath her a little valley, green-carpeted, beautiful. A wood rose near
the river, and at its edge she saw what she had come to see--Chavis'
shack.

And now she realized that for all the knowledge that a look at Chavis'
shack would give her, she might as well have stayed at the Flying W. She
didn't know just what she had expected to see when she got here, but what
she did see was merely the building, a small affair with a flat roof, the
spreading valley itself, and several steers grazing in it.

There were no other signs of life. She got off the pony and walked to the
edge of the plateau, discovering that the valley was much shallower than
she thought it would be, and that at her side, to the left, was the
declivity that the puncher had told her about. She leaned over the edge
and looked at it.

It was not so steep as she had expected when liste