hey run them down?" I asked, with terror at such a
result.

"No, they crowded her toward the cut-bank, and she was edging them off
and was almost past, when they came to a place where the bank bit in,
and her iron-mouthed brute wouldn't swerve, but went pounding on, broke
through, plunged; she couldn't spring free because of Joe, and pitched
headlong over the bank, while the cattle went thundering past. I flung
myself off Jingo and slid down somehow into the sand, thirty feet below.
Here was Joe safe enough, but the bronco lay with a broken leg, and half
under him was Gwen. She hardly knew she was hurt, but waved her hand to
me and cried out, 'Wasn't that a race? I couldn't swing this hard-headed
brute. Get me out.' But even as she spoke the light faded from her eyes,
she stretched out her hands to me, saying faintly, 'Oh, Duke,' and lay
back white and still. We put a bullet into the buckskin's head, and
carried her home in our jackets, and there she lies without a sound from
her poor, white lips."

The Duke was badly cut up. I had never seen him show any sign of grief
before, but as he finished the story he stood ghastly and shaking. He
read my surprise in my face and said:

"Look here, old chap, don't think me quite a fool. You can't know what
that little girl has done for me these years. Her trust in me--it is
extraordinary how utterly she trusts me--somehow held me up to my best
and back from perdition. It is the one bright spot in my life in this
blessed country. Everyone else thinks me a pleasant or unpleasant kind
of fiend."

I protested rather faintly.

"Oh, don't worry your conscience," he answered, with a slight return
of his old smile, "a fuller knowledge would only justify the opinion."
Then, after a pause, he added: "But if Gwen goes, I must pull out, I
could not stand it."

As we rode up, the doctor came out.

"Well, what do you think?" asked The Duke.

"Can't say yet," replied the old doctor, gruff with long army practice,
"bad enough. Good night."

But The Duke's hand fell upon his shoulder with a grip that must have
got to the bone, and in a husky voice he asked:

"Will she live?"

The doctor squirmed, but could not shake off that crushing grip.

"Here, you young tiger, let go! What do you think I am made of?" he
cried, angrily. "I didn't suppose I was coming to a bear's den, or I
should have brought a gun."

It was only by the most complete apology that The Duke could mollify the
old