ped across the field
and dashed into the woods. She called him, but he did not turn. Again
and again the shrill command of her little nickel-plated whistle echoed
in fields and woods. At last, in the direction he had taken, she started
running swiftly. Behind her hurried the two men, Burton breathing hard.

"This will never do!" gasped Ferris.

"Leave it to her!" commanded Burton.

At last, on top of a ridge, half a mile away, he reappeared. Three times
shriller and shriller she blew, and now he came galloping toward them.

"Come in!" she commanded.

He came to her, and she caught him quickly by the collar.

"I told you I could handle him!" she said proudly.

But her eyes were dilated. She was quiet on the ride home. She was
silent at the table.

Ferris joined his boss when the latter went to his room. Ferris stopped
with the postmaster down the street, as he had stopped for twenty years
when he was handling other men's dogs.

Ferris was depressed. That showing, he said, was terrible. If he bolted
to-day, what would he do to-morrow, with another dog to spur him on and
the crowd to excite him. They ought to do something--warn her, advise
her.

Burton smoked away. "Suppose we just leave it to the girl, Ferris," he
said quietly.

She was gone when next morning he came down to breakfast. She had left
with the wagon that hauled her dog to the place of trial, the other
diners said. Not once during the night or the morning had she let him
out of her sight.

The crowd, all mounted, had gathered at the beginning of the course when
Burton and Ferris rode up that brilliant winter morning. And a little to
one side, standing beside a wagon in which were two dog's crates, one
containing Arnold's Drake, the other Count Redstone, his brace mate,
stood the girl.

At her side a wiry Texas pony waited patiently. In a scabbard on the
saddle was strapped a twenty-gauge shotgun.

The girl looked small, slight, and brown in her riding suit. Underneath
a roughrider hat Burton glimpsed her face as she looked off across the
fields that marked the beginning of the course. Though brave and
composed, it showed the strain she was under. In that crate nearest her,
as she thought, was the hope of her crippled father.

Burton noticed that she did not glance up at the people about her, or
speak to them. Her eyes were fixed on those sunlit straw fields, so soon
to be her battleground. He liked her silence. From the beginning she had
p