“I don’t know; but—­but—­oh, me! you will think I am miserably weak and foolish:  but just as you said that, I seemed to see you lying in the road with your horse standing over you—­and you were—­dead!”

“Nonsense!” he comforted.  “I’ll be back here to-morrow, alive and well; but I mustn’t lose a minute now.  It’s up to me to reach Horse Creek before the news of the gold strike gets there.  There’ll be a stampede, with every laborer on the line hoofing it for Copah.  Good-by, sweetheart, and—­may I?” He took her face between his hands and did it anyhow.

Five minutes later he was bargaining for a saddle horse at the one livery stable in the camp, offering and paying the selling price of the animal for the two days’ hire.  It was a rather sorry mount at that, and when he was dragging it out into the street, Jack Benson, the youngest member of his staff, rode up, that moment in from the tie-camp above Cow Mountain.

“Don’t dismount, Jack,” he ordered curtly.  “You’re just in time to save me eight or ten miles, when the inches are worth dollars.  Ride for the end-of-track and Frisbie on a dead run.  Tell Dick to hold his men, if he has to do it at the muzzle of a gun, and to come on with the track, night and day.  He’ll have to raise the pay, and keep on raising it—­but that’s all right.  It’s an order.  Rush it!”

Benson nodded, set his horse at the path leading up to the railroad grade, and spurred up the hill.  Ford gave a final tug at his saddle cinches, put up a leg and began to pick his way down the thronged street in the opposite direction.

Thirty seconds afterward a man wearing the laced trousers and broad bullion-corded sombrero of a Mexican dandy came out of his hiding-place behind the door of the livery stable office, thoughtfully twirling the cylinder of a drawn revolver.

“I take-a da mustang,” he said to the boy who had held Ford’s horse during the short interview with Benson.  And when the bronco was brought out, the Mexican, like Ford, looked to the cinches, mounted, and rode down the street leading to the lower mesa and the river.

XXIV

RUIZ GREGORIO

He rode easily, as one born to the saddle, the leathers creaking musically under him to keep time to the shuffling fox-trot of the wiry little range pony.  Once free of the mining-camp and out upon the mesa, he found a corn-husk wrapper and his bag of dry tobacco and deftly rolled a cigarette, doing it with one hand, cow-boy fashion.  When the cigarette was lighted, the horseman ahead was a mere khaki-colored dot, rising and falling in the mellowing distance.

With the eye of a plainsman he measured the trail’s length to the broken hill range where the Pannikin emerges from its final wrestle with the gorges.  Then he glanced up at the dull crimson spot in the murky sky that marked the sun’s altitude.  There was time sufficient—­and the trail was long enough.  He did not push his horse out of the shuffling trot.  At the portal hills the horseman now disappearing over the rim of the high mesa would slacken speed.  In the canyon itself a dog could not go faster than a walk.