“I expect it was most ankle-deep,” she scoffed.  “Hello, we’re past Bald Knob!”

“They both came mighty nigh handing in their checks.”

“I didn’t know that, though I knew, of course, he was fearless,” Arlie said.

“What’s that?” Dick drew in his horse sharply, and looked back.

The sound of a rifle shot echoed from hillside to hillside.  Like a streak of light, the girl’s pinto flashed past him.  He heard her give a sobbing cry of anguish.  Then he saw that Steve was slipping very slowly from his saddle.

A second shot rang out.  The light was beginning to fail, but he made out a man’s figure crouched among the small pines on the shoulder of Bald Knob.  Dick jerked out his revolver as he rode back, and fired twice.  He was quite out of pistol range, but he wanted the man in ambush to see that help was at hand.  He saw Arlie fling herself from her pony in time to support the Texan just as he sank to the ground.

“She’ll take care of Steve.  It’s me for that murderer,” the young man thought.

Acting upon that impulse, he slid from his horse and slipped into the sagebrush of the hillside.  By good fortune he was wearing a gray shirt of a shade which melted into that of the underbrush.  Night falls swiftly in the mountains, and already dusk was softly spreading itself over the hills.

Dick went up a draw, where young pines huddled together in the trough; and from the upper end of this he emerged upon a steep ridge, eyes and ears alert for the least sign of human presence.  A third shot had rung out while he was in the dense mass of foliage of the evergreens, but now silence lay heavy all about him.  The gathering darkness blurred detail, so that any one of a dozen bowlders might be a shield for a crouching man.

Once, nerves at a wire edge from the strain on him, he thought he saw a moving figure.  Throwing up his gun, he fired quickly.  But he must have been mistaken, for, shortly afterward, he heard some one crashing through dead brush at a distance.

“He’s on the run, whoever he is.  Guess I’ll get back to Steve,” decided France wisely.

He found his friend stretched on the ground, with his head in Arlie’s lap.

“Is it very bad?” he asked the girl.

“I don’t know.  There’s no light.  Whatever shall we do?” she moaned.

“I’m a right smart of a nuisance, ain’t I?” drawled the wounded man unexpectedly.

She leaned forward quickly.  “Where are you hit?”

“In the shoulder, ma’am.”

“Can you ride, Steve?  Do you reckon you could make out the five miles?” Dick asked.

Arlie answered for him.  She had felt the inert weight of his heavy body and knew that he was beyond helping himself.  “No.  Is there no house near?  There’s Alec Howard’s cabin.”

“He’s at the round-up, but I guess we had better take Steve there—­ if we could make out to get him that far.”