rms about him.
As far as he could be comforted, Helen had comforted him.

But now, as she rode up the rocky trail, she murmured to herself:

"If I could only clear dad's name!"

Again she raised her eyes and saw a buckskin pony and its rider getting
nearer and nearer to the summit.

"Get on, Rose!" she exclaimed. "That chap will beat us out. Who under the
sun can he be?"

[Illustration: "HELEN CREPT ON HANDS AND KNEES TO THE EDGE OF THE BLUFF."
(Page 14)]

She was sure the rider of the buckskin was no Sunset puncher. Yet he
seemed garbed in the usual chaps, sombrero, flannel shirt and gay
neckerchief of the cowpuncher.

"And there isn't another band of cattle nearer than Froghole," thought the
girl, adjusting her body to the Rose pony's quickened gait.

She did not know it, but she was quite as much an object of interest to
the strange rider as he was to her. And it was worth while watching Helen
Morrell ride a pony.

The deep brown of her cheek was relieved by a glow of healthful red. Her
thick plaits of hair were really sunburned; her thick eyebrows were
startlingly light compared with her complexion.

Her eyes were dark gray, with little golden lights playing in them; they
seemed fairly to twinkle when she laughed. Her lips were as red as ripe
sumac berries; her nose, straight, long, and generously moulded, was
really her handsomest feature, for of course her hair covered her dainty
ears more or less.

From the rolling collar of her blouse her neck rose firm and solid--as
strong-looking as a boy's. She was plump of body, with good shoulders, a
well-developed arm, and her ornamented russet riding boots, with a tiny
silver spur in each heel, covered very pretty and very small feet.

Her hand, if plump, was small, too; but the gauntlets she wore made it
seem larger and more mannish than it was. She rode as though she were a
part of the pony.

She had urged on the strawberry roan and now came out upon the open
plateau at the top of the bluff just as the buckskin mounted to the same
level from the other side.

The rock called "the View" was nearer to the stranger than to herself. It
overhung the very steepest drop of the eminence.

Helen touched Rose with the spur, and the pony whisked her tail and shot
across the uneven sward toward the big boulder where Helen and her father
had so often stood to survey the rolling acres of Sunset Ranch.

Whether the stranger on the buckskin thought her mount had bolt