But if in one of the limbs, it would quickly show in the gait of the animal.

“No,” he murmured, “there is no change of pace; it could not have been much, and it may be she was not hit at all.”

The rustlers fired two shots at this moment, when the horseman was more of a target than his animal, but he gave no heed to that; it was she for whom he felt concern.

A glance backward brought a thrill of hope.  The distance between him and his pursuers had perceptibly increased.  Queenie was showing her heels to those who dared dispute with her the supremacy of fleetness.  She would soon leave them out of sight, unless it should prove she was disabled by some of the shots.

All would have gone well but for the appearance of a new danger of which he did not dream.

Suddenly Queenie emitted her faint, familiar whinny, and swerved to the left.  She had scented a new peril.

In the gloom almost directly ahead loomed the figures of other horsemen bearing down upon the fugitive.  They might be friends, and they might be enemies, but it would not do to take chances.  Without an instant’s hesitation Sterry wheeled to the left and spoke to his horse: 

“Now, Queenie, do your best.”

The mare responded with the same gameness she always showed; but the situation had suddenly become so grave that Monteith Sterry assuredly would have been overwhelmed and cut off but for one of the most extraordinary occurrences that ever came to any person in the extremity of danger.

CHAPTER XI.

A strange diversion.

It was the wonderful sagacity of the little mare which intervened at this crisis in the fate of her rider.

She was no more than fairly stretched away on a dead run from the new peril when she shot into an arroya or depression in the prairie.  Such a depression suggests the dry bed of a stream through which the water may not have flowed for years.  It is sometimes a few feet only in width, and again it may be a number of rods.  The rich, alluvial soil often causes a luxuriant growth of grass, cottonwood or bush, which affords the best of grazing and refuge for any one when hard pressed by the enemy.

The arroya into which Queenie plunged had gently sloping sides, and was perhaps fifty feet wide.  The bottom was covered not only with grass, but with the thin undergrowth to which allusion has been made, and which was so frail in character that it offered no impediment to the passage of a running horse.

Sterry’s expectation was that his mare would shoot across the depression and up the other bank with the least possible delay; but of her own accord, and without suggestion from him, she turned abruptly to the left and dropped to a walk.

He was astounded, and was on the point of speaking impatiently to her as he jerked the bridle-rein, when the occurrence already referred to took place, and made the action of the animal seem like an inspiration or instinct approaching the height of reason.