“All the boys do--all but Jed. I don't reckon he does.” “Do I have to like him because the boys do?” she demanded. “O' course not.” Dick stopped, trying to puzzle it out. “He says you ain't to blame, that he lied to you. That seems right strange, too. It ain't like Steve to lie.” “How do you know so much about him? You haven't known him a week.” “That's what Jed says. I say it ain't a question of time. Some men I've knew ten years I ain't half so sure of. He's a man from the ground up. Any one could tell that, before they had seen him five minutes.” Secretly, the girl was greatly pleased. She so wanted to believe that Dick was right. It was what she herself had thought. “I wish you'd seen him the day he pulled Siegfried out of Lost Creek. Tell you, I thought they were both goners,” Dick continued. “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.