The climax came.  She saw him look round quickly, and in an instant his pony was at the gallop and he was lying low on its neck.  A shot rang out, and another, but without checking his flight.  He turned in the saddle and waved a derisive hand at the shooters, then plunged into a wash and disappeared.

What inspired her she could never tell.  Perhaps it was her indignation at the thing he had done, perhaps her anger at that mocking wave of the hand with which he had vanished.  She wheeled her horse, and put it at a canter down the nearest draw so as to try to intercept him at right angles.  Her heart beat fast with excitement, but she was conscious of no fear.

Before she had covered half the distance, she knew she was going to be too late to cut off his retreat.  Faintly, she heard the rhythm of hoofs striking the rocky bottom of the draw.  Abruptly they ceased.  Wondering what that could mean, she found her answer presently.  For the pounding of the galloping broncho had renewed itself, and closer.  The man was riding up the gulch toward her.  He had turned into its mesquite-laced entrance for a hiding place.  Phyllis drew rein, and waited quietly to confront him, but with a pulse that hammered the moments for her.

A white-stockinged roan, plowing a way through heavy sand, labored into view round the bend, its rider slewed in the saddle with his whole attention upon the possible pursuit.  Not until he was almost upon her did the man turn.  With a startled exclamation at sight of the motionless figure, he pulled up sharply.  It was the nester, Keller.

“You,” she cried.

“Happy to meet you, Miss Sanderson,” he told her jauntily.

His revolver slid into its holster, and his hat came off in a low bow.  White, even teeth gleamed in a sardonic smile.

“So you are a—­rustler,” she told him scornfully.

“I hate to contradict a lady,” he came back, with a kind of bitter irony.

She saw something else, a deepening stain that soaked slowly down his shirt sleeve.

“You are wounded.”

“Am I?”

“Aren’t you?”

“Come to think of it, I believe I am,” he laughed shortly.

“Badly?”

“I haven’t got the doctor’s report yet.”  There was a gleam of whimsical gayety in his eyes as he added:  “I was going to find him when I had the good luck to meet up with you.”

He was a hunted miscreant, wounded, riding for his life as a hurt wolf dodges to shake off the pursuit, but strangely enough her gallant heart thrilled to the indomitable pluck of him.  Never had she seen a man who looked more the vagabond enthroned.  His crisp bronze curls and his superb shoulders were bathed in the sunpour.  Not once, since his eyes had fallen on her, had he looked back to see if his hunters had picked up the lost trail.  He was as much at ease as if his whole thought at meeting her were the pleasure of the encounter.