CHAPTER V

“I Can Spare this Particular Girl”

Ford’s range-trained vision told him, while yet afar off, that the lone horse feeding upon a side hill was saddled and bridled, with reins dragging; the telltale, upward toss of its head when it started on to find a sweeter morsel was evidence enough of the impeding bridle, even before he was near enough to distinguish the saddle.

Your true range man owns blood-relationship with the original Good Samaritan; Ford swung out of the trail and untied his rope as a matter of course.  The master of the animal might have turned him loose to feed, but if that were the case, he had strayed farther than was ever intended; the chances, since no human being was in sight, were all against design and in favor of accident.  At any rate Ford did not hesitate.  It is not good to let a horse run loose upon the range with a saddle cinched upon its back, as every one knows.

Ford was riding along the sheer edge of a water-worn gully, seeking a place where he might safely jump it—­or better, a spot where the banks sloped so that he might ride down into it and climb the bank beyond—­when he saw a head and pair of shoulders moving slowly along, just over the brow of the hill where fed the stray.  He watched, and when the figure topped the ridge and started down the slope which faced him, his eyes widened a trifle in surprise.

Skirts to the tops of her shoes betrayed her a woman.  She limped painfully, so that Ford immediately pictured to himself puckered eyebrows and lips pressed tightly together.  “And I’ll bet she’s crying, too,” he summed up aloud.  While he was speaking, she stumbled and fell headlong.

When he saw that she made no attempt to rise, but lay still just as she had fallen, Ford looked no longer for an easy crossing.  He glanced up and down the washout, saw no more promising point than where he was, wheeled and rode back twenty yards or so, turned and drove deep his spurs.

It was a nasty jump, and he knew it all along.  When Rambler rose gamely to it, with tensed muscles and forefeet flung forward to catch the bank beyond, he knew it better.  And when, after a sickening minute of frenzied scrambling at the crumbling edge, they slid helplessly to the bottom, he cursed his idiocy for ever attempting it.

Rambler got up with a pronounced limp, but Ford had thrown himself from the saddle and escaped with nothing worse than a skinned elbow.  They were penned, however, in a box-like gully ten feet deep, and there was nothing to do but follow it to where they might climb out.  Ford was worried about the girl, and made a futile attempt to stand in the saddle and from there climb up to the level.  But Rambler, lame as he was, plunged so that Ford finally gave it up and started down the gulch, leading Rambler by the reins.