She tied the uninterested Pedro securely and hung her saddle with the canteens and sacks and the packet of sandwiches over a limb, took her little hatchet in hand and climbed carefully down into the cañon. It was too dimly lighted to make out the animal at the bottom, but he was clearly to be heard, and she called to him, soothingly, coaxingly, cajolingly, and he stopped plunging to listen for an instant. “Good old boy, Snort ... good ... old ... boy!” The velvet voice steadied him. She could hear his great gasping breaths but he was not trumpeting; it was going to be easy, after all, and she was conscious, tolerantly amused at herself, of a little regret. The longer the chase, the harder the struggle, the more she was doing; the handsomer her service, the more dramatic her entrance. Dusk was coming rapidly up above and the green depths were in dark shadow; she should have brought her flash light. If the pixie steed refused to be taken in hand at once, if there ensued even a slight delay, they would be in darkness. With a sigh of impatience at her heedlessness, Ginger turned and scrambled up the steep incline again, slipping, pulling herself up by vines and roots, reached the trail, dug out the flash, and started down again. This time, a little breathless, hurrying, careless of the failing light, she did not watch her footholds and a large and permanent looking stone turned under her, almost tripping her, and went hurtling down. “It won’t--it won’t--it _won’t_ hit him!” she told herself vehemently, in prayerful assertion, but, if it did not, it grazed him closely enough to have the same result, for she could hear him rearing and crashing in a way that made his former panic seem like composure by comparison. Presently, the sounds warned her, he had headed back toward Marble Peak and the conflagration. And now the episode left off being an amusing little adventure and assumed the outlines of a grim task. Ginger shook off her temper and her disgust at her own carelessness, and looked intently about her. It would be half an hour, and perhaps more, before she brought Snort up, and she must make sure of finding her station on the trail, and Pedro. She mentally catalogued an oddly square rock, a grotesquely twisted root, took off her scarlet bandanna and tied it to a low limb, before she made her cautious descent. Two hours, dark and difficult ones, were to pass before she found her landmarks again. Her little wish to do her lover a service had come largely true: she had toiled in his cause as she had never toiled before in all her vigorous young life.