down under her chin.  Thus doubly anchored, and skewered with two hatpins besides, the hat might be counted upon to give Mary V no trouble, but a great deal of protection.  Worn with the checked riding breeches and the heavy, black puttees, it was not particularly becoming, but Mary V did not expect to meet many pairs of critical eyes.  Rolling R boys were too much like home folks to bother about, having been accustomed to seeing Mary V in strange and various guises since she was a tiny tot.

Southward she rode, and as swiftly as was wise if she valued the well-being of her horse.  Movies will have it that nothing short of a gallop is tolerated by riders in the West; whereas Mary V had been taught from her childhood up that she must never “run” her horse unless there was need of it.  She therefore contented herself with ambling along the trail at a distance-devouring trail-trot, slowing her horse to a walk on the rising slopes and urging him a little with her spurred heels on the levels.  She did not let him lag—­she could not, if she covered the distance she had in her mind to cover.

Away over to the south—­almost to Sinkhole Camp, in fact—­was a ridge that was climbable on horseback.  Not every ridge in that country was, and Mary V was not fond of walking in the sand on a hot day.  The ridge commanded a far view, and was said to be a metropolis among the snakes that populated the region.  Mary V had, very casually, mentioned to the boys that some day she meant to get a good picture of a snake den.  She said “the girls” did not believe that snakes went in bunches and writhed amicably together in their dens.  She was going to prove it to them.

A perfectly logical quest it was therefore that led her toward that ridge.  You could not blame Mary V if the view from the top of it extended to Sinkhole Camp and beyond.  She had not made the view, remember, nor had she advised the snakes to choose that ridge for their dens.  She was not even perfectly sure that they did choose it.  The boys had told her that Black Ridge was “full up” with snake dens, and she meant to see if they told the truth.

Wherefore her horse Tango laboriously carried Mary V up the ridge and kept his ears perked for the warning buzz of rattlers, and his eyes open for a feasible line retreat in case he heard one.  Tango knew just as well as Mary V when they were in snake country.  He had gone so far as to argue the point of climbing that ridge, but as usual Mary V’s argument was stronger than Tango’s, and he had yielded with an injured air that was quite lost upon his rider.  Mary V was thinking of something else.

They reached the top without having seen a single snake.  Tango seemed somewhat surprised at this, but Mary V was not.  Mary V thought it was too hot even for rattlesnakes, and as for the dearth of lizards—­well she supposed the snakes had eaten them all.  She had let Tango stop often to breathe, and whenever he did so she had looked south, scanning as much of the lower level as she could see, which was not the proper way to go about hunting snake dens, I assure you.  But at the top she permitted Tango to walk into the shade of a boulder that radiated heat like a stove but was still preferable to the blistering sunlight, and there she left him while she walked a little nearer the edge of the rimrock that topped the ridge on its southern side.