Some three or four miles from the ranch the mesa he was crossing ended abruptly in a cliff some two hundred feet high, which extended for several miles in an unbroken line with but one or two places where an animal could get up or down. The view from the edge of this cliff or "rim rock," as it was more commonly called, over the wide valley spread out below it for miles and miles was unexcelled, and Cameron, knowing that Miss Steele must come up this cliff at one of two places, headed for the one he felt she would be most likely to take. As he drew near the edge of the mesa he left the trail and rode over to the cliff; and thinking perhaps to surprise a bunch of antelope feeding quietly in the valley below him, as well as to prevent Miss Steele from first seeing him, should she chance to be below, he left his pony under a cedar and, taking his Winchester in his hand, carefully walked up to the edge of the cliff. The road leading down to the valley ran close under the cliff and was lost to sight around a point of the mesa but a short distance to his right. Carefully scanning the prairie, he could see no one, but, from the way three or four bunches of wild horses were tearing across the valley below him, he felt satisfied, that either she or some one else had started them, and concluded to wait a few moments. Suddenly, from far below, came a sound that for an instant sent his heart to his throat, for it seemed as if he heard a woman's voice, borne upward from around the point to his right, and yet it was far more likely to be the almost human cry of a mountain lion, or even the childish yell of some lone coyote, either of which could readily be mistaken for a female voice in distress. As Cameron stood there, fairly holding his breath in his eagerness to catch the faintest sound from below, one moment assuring himself that his ears were at fault and the next so certain that it was a woman's voice that he could scarcely wait for its repetition in order that he could be sure which way to go, once again there came faintly and yet more definitely than before the cry of distress. The voice was Miss Steele's, and before he was really sure from which quarter it came, there burst into sight around the point of the mesa, not a quarter of a mile away from him but down in the valley, the figure of a girl on horseback leaning low over her pony's neck, and urging him to his utmost speed on the road leading up to the cliff, while some forty or fifty feet behind her, riding as hard as she was the Navajo Chatto, his red head-band gone, his long black hair streaming out in the wind, and whirling over his head in a great loop his rawhide reata.