He laid her on the moss and looked about for water.  There was some in his canteen, but that was attached to the saddle on the top of the bluff.  For present purposes it might as well have been at the North Pole.  He could not leave her while she was like this.  But since he had to be giving some first aid, he drew from her foot the boot that had been in the steel trap, so as to relieve the ankle.

Her eyelids fluttered, she gave a deep sigh, and looked with a perplexed doubt upon the world to which she had just returned.

“You fainted,” Roy told her by way of explanation.

The young woman winced and looked at her foot.  The angry color flushed into her cheeks.  Her annoyance was at herself, but she visited it upon him.

“Who told you to take off my boot?”

“I thought it might help the pain.”

She snatched up the boot and started to pull it on, but gave this up with a long breath that was almost a groan.

“I’m a nice kind of a baby,” she jeered.

“It must hurt like sixty,” he ventured.  Then, after momentary hesitation:  “You’d better let me bind up your ankle.  I have water in my canteen.  I’ll run up and get some as soon as I’m through.”

There was something of sullen suspicion in the glance her dark eyes flashed at him.

“You can get me water if you want to,” she told him, a little ungraciously.

He understood that his offer to tie up the ankle had been refused.  When he returned with his horse twenty minutes later, he knew why she had let him go for the water.  It had been the easiest way to get rid of him for the time.  The fat bulge beneath her stocking showed that she had taken advantage of his absence to bind the bruised leg herself.

“Is it better now—­less painful?” he asked.

She dismissed his sympathy with a curt little nod.  “I’m the biggest fool in Washington County.  We’ve been setting traps for wolves.  They’ve been getting our lambs.  I jumped off my horse right into this one.  Blacky is a skittish colt and when the trap went off, he bolted.”

He smiled a little at the disgust she heaped upon herself.

“You’ll have to ride my horse to your home.  How far is it?”

“Five miles, maybe.”  The girl looked at her ankle resentfully.  It was plain that she did not relish the idea of being under obligations to him.  But to attempt to walk so far was out of the question.  Even now when she was not using the foot she suffered a good deal of pain.

“Cornell isn’t a bit skittish.  He’s an old plug.  You’ll find his gait easy,” Beaudry told her.

If she had not wanted to keep her weight from the wounded ankle, she would have rejected scornfully his offer to help her mount, for she was used to flinging her lithe body into the saddle as easily as her brothers did.  The girl had read in books of men aiding women to reach their seat on the back of a horse, but she had not the least idea how the thing was done.  Because of her ignorance she was embarrassed.  The result was that they boggled the business, and it was only at the third attempt that he got her on as gracefully as if she had been a sack of meal.