twinkling feet and a scarlet
Tam, and Jessica was gone.

"Why--why--what? Eh, what?" he demanded, rising.

His answer came with a crash and clatter which could never have been made
by one small, fleeing figure, and with the startling force with which
everything happened on that eventful day.

Over the bluff scrambled a shaggy piebald burro, from whose back there
tumbled at the stranger's very feet a brace of little lads, securely
lashed together; even their wrists and ankles bound beyond possibility
of their own undoing.

"Horrors! Indian captives!" cried the gentleman, aghast.

CHAPTER II

A BAD BUSINESS.

Captives? Far from it--save to their own reckless disregard of life and
limb, and all for a bit of hitherto untested fun.

Shrieking with laughter at the success of their experiment, they rolled
and floundered on the ground, till the laughter changed to cries of pain
as their restless writhings to and fro drove their self-inflicted bonds
deeper into the flesh.

By some dexterity they got upon their feet, at last, and one implored:

"Oh! you Pedro! or you, man! Cut us loose, can't you? Don't you see we
can't do it ourselves?"

Mr. Hale adjusted his eyeglasses and looked rather helplessly toward the
shepherd; but that phlegmatic person was working away on his wonderful
basket as stolidly as if there was none beside himself upon the mesa.

"Oh! you hateful old Pedro! Cut us free, I tell you! Ain't I your
master? You'd do it mighty quick for 'Lady Jess.'"

The frightened little fellow, whose fun had now ebbed into a terrible
fear of an indefinite bondage, began to whimper, and Mr. Hale to act. A
few sharp slashings of the horsehair thongs and the captives were free
to express their delight in a series of somersaults, which were only
arrested by sight of Prince in the distance, holding up his injured foot
and seeking for some pasture amid the dry herbage.

"Hello! That horse is new. Is he yours, mister? What's the matter with
him? Humph! I guess you're new, too, aren't you? I never saw you in our
valley before. Where's your ranch?"

The questioner was a blue-eyed, fair-haired little chap whose close
resemblance to Jessica proclaimed him her brother; but he was younger,
sturdier, and less courteous than she. Yet his prolonged stare at the
stranger had less of rudeness than surprise in it, and Mr. Hale laughed
at the frank inspection.

"You look rather 'new' yourself, my man. About eight years,