Carolyn June gazed, wide-eyed, speechless with horror, at the horse in the sand. When the rope broke, Old Blue, with a groan almost human, sank back and quickly settled down until only his head and part of his neck were exposed to view. The Ramblin' Kid looked at the broken rope--the end fastened around the throat of Old Blue had whipped back and was lying far beyond the cowboy's reach. The piece half-hitched to the saddle horn was too short for another throw. Old Blue was doomed. Carolyn June saw him sinking gradually, surely, into the sand. It seemed ages. His eyes appealed with dumb pathos to the group on the bank. They could hear his breath coming in harsh, terrible gasps. The sand seemed to be deliberately torturing him as though it were some hellish thing, alive and of fiendish cunning, that grasped its victim and then paused in his destruction to gloat over his hopeless agony. The Ramblin' Kid sat Captain Jack and watched. "Why did God ever want to make that stuff anyhow!" sprang hoarsely from his lips. He was torn between blind unreasoning anger at the quicksand and pity for the struggling horse. Suddenly he jerked the forty-four, always on his saddle, from its holster. As the gun swung back and then forward there was a crashing report and Old Blue's head dropped, with a convulsive shudder, limp on the sand. Carolyn June screamed and buried her face in her hands. At the sound of the shot Captain Jack stiffened and stood rigid. The Ramblin' Kid, his face white and drawn, sat and looked dry-eyed at the red stream oozing from the round hole just below the brow-band of the bridle on the head of the horse he had killed. "I--I--would have wanted somebody to do it to me!" he said softly and rode to the side of the girl huddled on the ground. He dismounted and stood, without speaking, looking down at her shaking form. After a time she looked up, through eyes drenched with tears, into his face. Then as if drawn by an irresistible impulse--one she could not deny--she turned her head and looked at the spot where Old Blue had fought his last battle with the quicksands of the Cimarron. A crimson stain, already darkening, on the white surface; a few square feet of disturbed and broken sand, even now settling into the smooth, innocent-looking tranquillity that hid the death lurking in its depths; a short length of rope, one end drawn beneath the sand, the other lying in a sprawling coil; her hat resting a little distance to one side, were all that remained to tell the story of the grim tragedy of the morning. She shuddered and looked once more into the pain-filled eyes of the Ramblin' Kid. "We'd better be goin'," he said quietly, "you're wet an' them clothes must be uncomfortable. You can ride Captain Jack!" She stood up weak and trembling. "I--I--thought Captain Jack was an outlaw," she said with a faint smile. "He won't let me ride him, will he?"