“Buck!”

“My heart, it stood plumb still!  I gives my hoss the spurs and we went down the next slope.  And I don’t remember nothin’ except that we got to the Circle K Bar after a million years, ’most, and when we got there the piebald flops on the ground—­near dead.  But I made the change and started off agin, and that next hoss was even better than the piebald—­a sure goer!  When he started I could tell by his gait what he was, and I looked up at the sky——­”

He stopped, embarrassed.

“And thanked God, Buck?”

“Kate, I ain’t ashamed if maybe I did.  But since then I ain’t seen or heard Dan, but all the time I rode I was expecting to hear his whistle behind me, close up.”

All the life died from her face.

“No, Buck, if he’d a followed all the way he would have caught you in spite of your relay.  No, I understand what happened.  After a while he remembered that Mac Strann was waiting for him back in Brownsville.  And he left your trail to be taken up later and went back to Brownsville.  You didn’t see him follow you after you left the Circle X Bar?”

“No.  I didn’t dare look back.  But somehow I knew he was comin’.”

She shook her head.

“He won’t come, Buck.  He’ll go back to meet Mac Strann—­and then——­” She ran to the chair of Buck swiftly and caught his hands:  “What sort of a man is Mac Strann?”

But Buck smiled strangely up into her face.

“Does it make any difference,” he said, “to Dan?”

She went slowly back to her place.

“No,” she admitted, “no difference.”

“If you came by relays for twenty-four hours,” said the doctor, numbering his points upon accurate fingertips, “it is humanly impossible that this man could have followed you very closely.  It will probably take him another day to arrive.”

But here his glance fell upon old Joe Cumberland, and found the cattleman smiling faintly to himself.

Buck Daniels was considering the last remark seriously.

“No,” he said, “it ain’t possible.  Besides, what Kate says may be true.  She ought to know—­she says he’ll wait for Mac Strann.  I didn’t think of that; I thought I was savin’ Dan from another—­well, what a damn fool I been!”

He unknotted his bandana and with it mopped his face to a semblance of cleanliness.

“It was the ridin’ that done it,” he explained, shame-faced.  “You put a man on a hoss for a certain time, and after a while he gets so he can’t think.  He’s sort of nutty.  That was the way with me when I come in.”

“Open the window on the veranda,” said Joe Cumberland.  “I want to feel the wind.”

The doctor obeyed the instruction, and again he noted that same quiet, contented smile on the lips of the old man.  For some reason it made him ill at ease to see it.

“He won’t get here for eight or ten hours,” went on Buck Daniels, easing himself into a more comfortable position, and raising his head a little higher.  “Ten hours more, even if he does come.  That’ll give me a chance to rest up; right now I’m kind of shaky.”