All of this, dazed by the misfortune, Marianne waited to see, but as the first of the pursuers darted out of sight she turned and ran to the box stall where she kept her favorite pony, a nimble bay, inimitable on a mountain trail and with plenty of foot on the flat.  But never did hurry waste so much precious time.  The rush of her entrance in the dark startled the nervous horse, and she had to soothe it for a minute or more with a voice broken by excitement.  After that, there was the saddling to be done and her fingers stumbled and stuttered over the straps so that when at last she led the bay out and swung up to the saddle there was no sound or sight of the cowpunchers.  But a young moon was edging above the eastern mountains and by that light, now only an illusory haze, she hoped to gain sight of her men.

Down the road she jockeyed the mare at the top of her pace with the barbed wire running in three dim streaks of light on either side until at last she struck the edge of the desert.  The moon was now well above the horizon and the sands rolled in dun levels and black hollows over which she could peer for a considerable distance.  Still there was no sight of her cowpunchers and this was a matter of small wonder, for a ten minute start had sent them far away ahead of her.

It would never do to push ahead with a blind energy.  Already the bay was beginning to feel the run, and Marianne reluctantly drew down to the long lope which is the favorite gait of the cowpony.  At this pace she rocked on over mile after mile of desert through the moonhaze, but never a token of the cowpunchers came on her.  Twice she was on the verge of turning back; twice she shook her head and urged the mare on again.  Hour upon hour had slipped by her.  Perhaps Hervey long since had given up the chase and turned towards the ranch.  In the meantime, so much alike was all the ground she covered that she seemed to be riding on a treadmill but yet she could not return.

The moon floated higher and higher as the night grew old and at length there was a dim lightening in the east which foretold dawn, but Marianne kept on.  If she lost the mares it would be very much like losing her last claim to the respect of her father.  She could see him, in prospect, shrug his shoulders and roll another cigarette; above all she could see Lew Hervey smile with a suppressed wisdom.  Both of them had, from the first, not only disapproved of the long price of the Coles horses, but of their long legs as well and their “damned high heads.”  She had kept telling herself fiercely that before long, when the mares were used to mountain ways and trails, she would ride one of them against the pick of Hervey’s saddle ponies and at the end of a day he would know how much blood counts in horse flesh!  But if that chance were lost to her with the mares themselves—­she did not know where she could find the courage to go back and face the people at the ranch.  Meantime the dawn grew slowly