thers
followed in an unfamiliar throng, which watched her curiously when,
breathless and exhausted, she dropped down beside a little spring to
drink. The water refreshed her. She lay back on the cattle-tramped hill
to rest.

Dawn was rosy in the east when she awoke, dazed to find herself alone
in a deep gorge. Her mission recurred to her, and again she took the
climbing road. Now, however, the way was hard, for it rose ever before
her, and her feet were swollen.

As the day advanced it grew sultry, with a menace of clouds to the
west. After a time the great peaks were lost in dark clouds, and
distant thunder boomed. A lance of lightning rent the nearer sky, and
flashed its vivid whiteness into the gorge. This had narrowed so that
between the steep hills there was only room for the arroyo and the
little roadway beside it. Before the rain began to fall on Lola's bare
head, as it did shortly in sheets, the stream-bed had become a raging
torrent, down which froth and spume and uprooted saplings were
spinning.

In an instant the canyon was a wild tumult of thunder and roaring water,
and Lola, barely keeping her feet, had laid hold of a pinon on the
lower slope and was burying her head in the spiked branches. Wind and
rain buffeted the child. The ground began to slip and slide with the
furious downpour, but she held fast, possessed of a great fear of the
torrent sweeping down below her.

As she listened to the crashing of the swollen tide, another noise
seemed to mingle with the sound of the mountain waters--a sound of
bellowing and trampling, as of a stampeded herd. A sudden horror of
great rolling eyes and rending horns and crazy hoofs hurtled through
the girl's dizzy brain. Her hands loosened. She began to slip down.

The rain had slackened when Bev Gribble, looking from his herder's hut
up on the _mesa_, saw that his "bunch" of cattle had disappeared.
Certain tracks on the left of the upland pasture exhibited traces of a
hasty departure. That there had been a cloudburst over toward the Peaks
he was as yet ignorant; nor did he discover this until he had caught
his cow-pony and descended into the ravine.

The sun was shining now, and the arroyo was nothing more than a placid,
though muddy stream. Its gleaming sides, however, spoke lucidly to
Bev's intelligence, and he set the pony at a smarter pace in the marshy
road.

"_Sus! Sus!_" said Bev to his pony, who knew Spanish best, being a
bronco from the south. But Co