“A fellow can’t always guess right,” pleaded the Texan.  “If he could, what a fiend he would be at playing the wheel!  Shall I go back and tell him I misremembered for a moment where the creek is?”

“No, sir.  You had me scared badly enough when you drew their attention to yourself.  Why did you do it?”

“It was the surest way to disarm any suspicion they might have had.  One of them had just said the man they wanted was like me.  Presently, one would have been guessing that it was me.”  He looked at her drolly, and added:  “You played up to me fine, sis.”

A touch of deeper color beat into her dusky cheeks.  “We’ll drop the relationship right now, if you please.  I said only what you made me say,” she told him, a little stiffly.

But presently she relaxed to the note of friendliness, even of comradeship, habitual to her.  She was a singularly frank creature, having been brought up in a country where women were few and far, and where conventions were of the simplest.  Otherwise, she would not have confessed to him with unconscious näiveté, as she now did, how greatly she had been troubled for him before she received the note from Speed.

“It worried me all the time, and it troubled dad, too.  I could see that.  We had hardly left you before I knew we had done wrong.  Dad did it for me, of course; but he felt mighty bad about it.  Somehow, I couldn’t think of anything but you there, with all those men shooting at you.  Suppose you had waited too long before surrendering!  Suppose you had been killed for us!” She looked at him, and felt a shiver run over her in the warm sunlight.  “Night before last I was worn out.  I slept some, but I kept dreaming they were killing you.  Oh, you don’t know bow glad I was to get word from Speed that you were alive.”  Her soft voice had the gift of expressing feeling, and it was resonant with it now.

“I’m glad you were glad,” he said quietly.

Across Dead Cow Creek they rode, following the stream up French Cañon to what was known as the Narrows.  Here the great rock walls, nearly two thousand feet high, came so close together as to leave barely room for a footpath beside the creek which boiled down over great bowlders.  Unexpectedly, there opened in the wall a rock fissure, and through this Arlie guided her horse.

The Texan wondered where she could be taking him, for the fissure terminated in a great rock slide some two hundred yards ahead of them.  Before reaching this she turned sharply to the left, and began winding in and out among the big bowlders which had fallen from the summit far above.

Presently Fraser observed with astonishment that they were following a path that crept up the very face of the bluff.  Up—­ up—­ up they went until they reached a rift in the wall, and into this the trail went precipitously.  Stones clattered down from the hoofs of the horses as they clambered up like mountain goats.  Once the Texan had to throw himself to the ground to keep Teddy from falling backward.