“Say, that’s a good notion.  If I was a buyer I’d pay ten bucks more after you’d put him through that circus stuff.”

“Which is Miller’s saddle?” When it was pointed out to him, Dave examined it and pretended to disapprove.  “Too heavy.  Lend me a lighter one, can’t you?”

“Sure.  Here’s three or four.  Help yourself.”

The wrangler moved into the stable to attend to his work.

Dave cinched, swung to the saddle, and rode to the gate of the corral.  Two men were coming in, and by the sound of their voices were quarreling.  They stepped aside to let him pass, one on each side of the gate, so that it was necessary to ride between them.

They recognized the pinto at the same moment Dave did them.  On the heels of that recognition came another.

Doble ripped out an oath and a shout of warning.  “It’s Sanders!”

A gun flashed as the pony jumped to a gallop.  The silent night grew noisy with shots, voices, the clatter of hoofs.  Twice Dave fired answers to the challenges which leaped out of the darkness at him.  He raced across the bridge spanning the Platte and for a moment drew up on the other side to listen for sounds which might tell him whether he would be pursued.  One last solitary revolver shot disturbed the stillness.

The rider grinned.  “Think he’d know better than to shoot at me this far.”

He broke his revolver, extracted the empty shells, and dropped them to the street.  Then he rode up the long hill toward Highlands, passed through that suburb of the city, and went along the dark and dusty road to the shadows of the Rockies silhouetted in the night sky.

His flight had no definite objective except to put as much distance between himself and Denver as possible.  He knew nothing about the geography of Colorado, except that a large part of the Rocky Mountains and a delectable city called Denver lived there.  His train trip to it had told him that one of its neighbors was New Mexico, which was in turn adjacent to Arizona.  Therefore he meant to get to New Mexico as quickly as Chiquito could quite comfortably travel.

Unfortunately Dave was going west instead of south.  Every step of the pony was carrying him nearer the roof of the continent, nearer the passes of the front range which lead, by divers valleys and higher mountains beyond, to the snowclad regions of eternal white.

Up in this altitude it was too cold to camp out without a fire and blankets.

“I reckon we’ll keep goin’, old pal,” the young man told his horse.  “I’ve noticed roads mostly lead somewheres.”

Day broke over valleys of swirling mist far below the rider.  The sun rose and dried the moisture.  Dave looked down on a town scattered up and down a gulch.

He met an ore team and asked the driver what town it was.  The man looked curiously at him.

“Why, it’s Idaho Springs,” he said.  “Where you come from?”