esitated before
three or four feasible outlets to the little flat, and chose the one
farthest to the right. That carried her farther south, and deeper into a
maze of gulches and gorges and small, hidden valleys. She did not stop,
but she began to see that it was going to be pure chance, or the guiding
hand of a tender Providence, if one ever did find anybody in this
horrible jumble. She had never seen such a mess. She believed that poor
little tot had come down in here, after all; she could not see why,
but then you seldom did know why children took a notion to do certain
unbelievable things. Miss Allen had taught the primary grade in a city
school, and she knew a little about small boys and girls and the big
ideas they sometimes harbored.

She rode and rode, trying to put herself mentally in the Kid's place.
Trying to pick up the thread of logical thought--children were logical
sometimes--startlingly so.

"I wonder," she thought suddenly, "if he started out with the idea of
hunting cattle! I wouldn't be a bit surprised if he did--living on
a cattle ranch, and probably knowing that the men were down here
somewhere." Miss Allen, you see, came pretty close to the truth with her
guess.

Still, that did not help her find the Kid. She saw a high, bald peak
standing up at the mouth of the gorge down which she was at that time
picking her way, and she made up her mind to climb that peak and see
if she might not find him by looking from that point of vantage. So she
rode to the foot of the pinnacle, tied her horse to a bush and began to
climb.

Peaks like that are very deceptive in their height Miss Allen was slim
and her lungs were perfect, and she climbed steadily and as fast as
she dared. For all that it took her a long while to reach the top--much
longer than she expected. When she reached the black rock that looked,
from the bottom, like the highest point of the hill, she found that she
had not gone much more than two-thirds of the way up, and that the real
peak sloped back so that it could not be seen from below at all.

Miss Allen was a persistent young woman. She kept climbing until she
did finally reach the highest point, and could look down into gorges
and flats and tiny basins and canyons and upon peaks and ridges and
worm-like windings, and patches of timber and patches of grass and
patches of barren earth and patches of rocks all jumbled up together--.
Miss Allen gasped from something more than the climb, and