in high-heeled riding boots assumes
the proportions of a real journey, even under the most favourable
circumstances, but with the precipitous descents, the steep climbs, and
the alkali flats between the coulees, which in dry weather are dazzling
white, and hard and level as a floor, now merely grey greasy beds of
slime into which he sank to the ankles at each step, the trip proved a
nightmare of torture.

At the end of an hour he figured that he had covered half the distance.
He was plodding doggedly, every muscle aching from the unaccustomed
strain. His feet, which burned and itched where the irritating soap
rubbed into his skin, had swollen until the boots held them in a
vise-like grip of torture. At each step he lifted pounds of glue-like
mud which clung to the legs of his leather chaps in a thick grey smear.
And each step was a separate, conscious, painful effort, that required a
concentration of will to consummate.

And so he plodded, this Texan, who would have cursed the petty mishap of
an ill-thrown loop to the imminent damnation of his soul, enduring the
physical torture in stoic silence. Once or twice he smiled grimly, the
cynical smile that added years to the boyish face. "When I see her safe
at some ranch, I'll beat it," he muttered thickly. "I'll go somewhere
an' finish my jamboree an' then I'll hit fer some fresh range." To his
surprise he suddenly found that the mere thought of whisky was
nauseating to him. His memory took him back to a college town in his
native State. "It used to be that way," he grinned, "when I'd get
soused, I couldn't look at a drink for a week. I reckon stayin' off of
it for a whole year has about set me back where I started."

He half-climbed, half-fell down the steep side of a coulee and dipped
his aching head in the cool water at the bottom. With a stick he scraped
the thick smear of grey mud from his chaps and boots, and washed them in
the creek. He rose to his feet and stood looking down into a clear
little pool. "By God, I can't go--like that!" he said aloud. "I've got
to stay an' face Win! I've got to know that he don't think there's
anything--wrong--with her!"

Instead of climbing the opposite slope, he followed down the coulee, for
he had seen from the edge that it led into a creek valley of
considerable width, above the rim of which rose the thin grey plume of
smoke. Near the mouth of the coulee he crawled through a wire fence.
"First time a nester's fence ever looked g