it.

"Well, maybe he would," she said, finally.

"Maybe I'll make good along with Sherlock Holmes." He winked at her as
he slipped from his horse's back, on the edge of a rocky knoll, fronting
the jack-pines. "This is the place, I reckon." His quick eyes had
caught a dark stain on a flat rock, which the rain had failed to cleanse
entirely of the dead herders' blood.

When Dorothy saw it, too, her mirth subsided. To her mind, the thought
of death was most horrible, and especially so in the case of a murderous
death, such as had befallen the sheep men. Not only was the thing
horrible in itself, but still more so in its suggestion of the dangers
which threatened her friends.

"Do hurry!" she begged. "There can't be anything here."

"Just a minute or two." Struck by the note of appeal in her voice, so
unlike its lilt of the moment before, he added: "Ride on if you want
to."

"No," she shuddered. "I'll wait, but please be quick."

It was well for her companion that she did wait, or at least that she
was with him for, when he had inspected the immediate vicinity of the
shooting, he stepped backward from the top of the knoll into a little,
brush-filled hollow, in which lay a rattlesnake. Deeply interested in
his search, he did not hear the warning rattle, and Dorothy might not
have noticed it either had not her pony raised its head, with a start
and a snort. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw the snake and called
out sharply.

"Look out, behind you, Lem!"

There are men, calling themselves conjurors, who perform prodigies of
agility with coins, playing-cards, and other articles of legerdemain,
but they are not so quick as was Trowbridge in springing sidewise from
the menacing snake. In still quicker movement, the heavy Colt at his
side leaped from its holster. The next second the rattle had ceased
forever, for the snake's head had been neatly cut from its body.

"Close call! Thanks!" Trowbridge slid his weapon back into its resting
place and smiled up at her.

So close, indeed, had the call been that, coming upon the dreadful
associations of the spot, Dorothy was unnerved. Her skin turned a sickly
white and her lips were trembling, but not more so than were the flanks
of the horses, which seemed to be in an agony of fear. When the girl saw
Trowbridge pick up a withered stick and coolly explore the recesses of a
small hole near which the snake had been coiled, she rebelled.

"I'm not going to stay here another m