horse’s near-by attendance.  Now, the best of cow-horses are not above taking advantage of their opportunities.  Perhaps Snip felt that fenceriding with a tenderfoot was a little beneath the dignity of his cattle-punching years.  Perhaps he reasoned that this man who was always doing such strange things was purposely dismissing him.  Perhaps he was thinking of the long watering trough and the rich meadow grass at home.  Or, perhaps again, the wise old Snip, feeling the responsibility of his part in training the Dean’s pupil, merely thought to give his inexperienced master a lesson.  However it happened, Patches looked up from his work some time later to find himself alone.  In consternation, he stood looking about, striving to catch a glimpse of the vanished Snip.  Save a lone buzzard that wheeled in curious circles above his head there was no living thing in sight.

As fast as his heavy, leather chaps and high-heeled, spur-ornamented boots would permit, he ran to the top of a knoll a hundred yards or so away.  The wider range of country that came thus within the circle of his vision was as empty as it was silent.  The buzzard wheeled nearer—­the strange looking creature beneath it seemed so helpless that there might be in the situation something of vital interest to the tribe.  Even buzzards must be about their business.

There are few things more humiliating to professional riders of the range than to be left afoot; and while Patches was far too much a novice to have acquired the peculiar and traditional tastes and habits of the clan of which he had that morning felt himself a member, he was, in this, the equal of the best of them.  He thought of himself walking shamefaced into the presence of the Dean and reporting the loss of the horse.  The animal might be recovered, he supposed, for he was still, Patches thought, inside the pasture which that fence enclosed.  Still there was a chance that the runaway would escape through some break and never be found.  In any case the vision of the grinning cowboys was not an attractive one.  But at least, thought the amateur cowboy, he would finish the work entrusted to him.  He might lose a horse for the Dean, but the Dean’s fence should be repaired.  So he set to work with a will, and, finishing that particular break, set out on foot to follow the fence around the field and so back to the lane that would lead him to the buildings and corrals of the home ranch.

For an hour he trudged along, making hard work of it in his chaps, boots, and spurs, stopping now and then to drive a staple or brace a post.  The country was growing wilder and more broken, with cedar timber on the ridges and here and there a pine.  Occasionally he could catch a glimpse of the black, forbidding walls of Tailholt Mountain.  But Patches did not know that it was Tailholt.  He only thought that he knew in which direction the home ranch lay.  It seemed to him that it was a long, long way to the corner of the field—­it must be a big pasture,