“Yes.  I suspected that much.”  She had plucked a red seed-ball off the bush nearest her and was nibbling daintily the sweet pulp off the outside.

“Where is the horse?” Ford was holding himself rigidly hack from an outburst of temper.

“Oh, I don’t know, I’m sure.”  She picked another seed-ball and began upon it.  “He should be somewhere around, unless he has taken a notion to go home.”

Ford said something under his breath and untied his rope from the saddle.  He knew about where the horse had been feeding when he saw him, and he judged that it would naturally graze in the direction of home—­which would probably be somewhere off to the southeast, since the trail ran more or less in that direction.  Without a word to the girl, or a glance toward her, he started up the hill, hoping to get his bearings and a sight of the horse from the top.  He could not remember when he had been so angry with a woman.  “If she was a man,” he gritted as he climbed, “I’d give her a thrashing or leave her out there, just as she deserves.  That’s the worst of dealing with a woman—­she can always hand it to you, and you’ve got to give her a grin and thank-you, because she ain’t a man.”

He glanced back, then, and saw her sitting with her head dropped forward upon her hands.  There was something infinitely pitiful and lonely in her attitude, and he knitted his brows over the contrast between it and her manner when he left her.  “I don’t suppose a woman knows, herself, what she means, half the time,” he hazarded impatiently.  “She certainly didn’t have any excuse for throwing it into me the way she did; maybe she’s sorry for it now.”

After that his anger cooled imperceptibly, and he hurried a little faster because the day was waning with the chill haste of mid-autumn, and he recalled what she had said at first about being afraid of coyotes.  And, although the storm of three days ago had been swept into mere memory by that sudden chinook wind, and the days were once more invitingly warm and hazily tranquil, night came shiveringly upon the land and the unhoused thought longingly of hot suppers and the glow of a fire.

The girl’s horse was, he believed, just disappearing into a deep depression half a mile farther on; but when he reached the place where he had seen it, there was nothing in sight save a few head of cattle and a coyote trotting leisurely up the farther slope.  He went farther down the shallow coulee, then up to the high level beyond, his rope coiled loosely over one arm with the end dragging a foot behind him.  But there was nothing to be seen from up there, except that the sun was just a red disk upon the far-off hills, and that the night was going to be uncomfortably cool if that wind kept blowing from the northwest.

He began to feel slightly uneasy about the girl, and to regret wasting any time over her horse, and to fear that he might not be able to get close enough to rope the beast, even if he did see him.