"And poor--like an army of tramps," she thought. "Very desperate tramps--oh, why didn't I keep on and try to warn Marc?" She could not understand her panic, now that her own danger was over and the men had passed. Marc Scott had called her a brave girl, and she had saved her own skin and let him walk into the trap. She sobbed bitterly. If there was only anything that she could do! To sit there in that awful silence was more than she could bear. She could no longer see the riders, who had turned the curve and were out of sight and sound. Far off in the distance two buzzards circled about over something that was dead or dying. Perhaps it was a man--at the thought the girl rose unsteadily to her feet. She could not stay alone another moment in this horrible place; she would go and find Scott, if she had to brave Angel Gonzales to do it. With a recklessness born of desperation she slid and scuffled down the side of the cliff and ran blindly down the trail. CHAPTER XV ANGEL Scott, starting breezily down the trail after the recreant horses, whistled a tune as he went, for he was happy. He did not weigh reason against happiness--it was too soon for that. He would have given you, however, if pressed, a number of very good reasons why he and Polly Street were going to be happy together, in spite of their different upbringing, and his own not very lucid reasons for not having wanted to marry her. Just at present he was occupied with the idea of the horses. He felt that they would not be apt to go back on the trail unless it was to look for water, and water they might find at the bottom of the ravine though the underbrush was too dense for him to see it. He could follow their trail very easily in the sandy path but he walked a quarter of a mile before he found the place where they had struck out of the trail for the bottom of the ravine. Very cautiously he started down, for the going was decidedly bad and he had no wish to risk a fall. He trailed the prints, marveling at the sure-footedness of the animal which can follow so hazardous a path. "I wouldn't dare put a horse down a trail like this," he mused with a grin, "and yet the rascals will go down by themselves as smooth as silk. Hullo, I guessed right! There is water down here. There's old Jasper filling up on it, and the mare, too. Well, I guess we don't walk home this trip." And just as Polly, some hundreds of feet above him was trying madly to reach the cave, Scott, quite oblivious of impending danger, started on his difficult climb, leading the two horses. "Serve you darn well right, you fellows, if I was to make you haul me," he said, as Jasper's soft nose rubbed against his shoulder. "I would, too, if I didn't think you'd slide down and break my neck just when my girl needs me. Come on, you grafters, shake a leg, will you?"