ecause she could not hear too often the answer.

"You know whether I am. Oh, June girl, I didn't know it would be like
this," he cried.

"Nor I, Bob."

Their lithe bodies leaned from the saddles. They held each other close
while their lips met.

They were on their way to Pete Tolliver's to tell him the great news.
Soon now the old cabin and its outbuildings would break into view. They
had only to climb Twelve-Mile Hill.

Out of a draw to the right a horse moved. Through the brush something
dragged behind it.

"What's that?" asked June.

"Don't know. Looks kinda queer. It's got some sort of harness on."

They rode to the draw. June gave a small cry of distress.

"Oh, Bob, it's a man."

He dismounted. The horse with the dragging load backed away, but it was
too tired to show much energy. Bob moved forward, soothing the animal
with gentle sounds. He went slowly, with no sudden gestures. Presently he
was patting the neck of the horse. With his hunting-knife he cut the
rawhide thongs that served as a harness.

"It's a Ute pony," he said, after he had looked it over carefully. He
knew this because the Indians earmarked their mounts.

June was still in the saddle. Some instinct warned her not to look too
closely at the load behind that was so horribly twisted.

"Better go back to the road, June," her husband advised. "It's too late
to do anything for this poor fellow."

She did as he said, without another look at the broken body.

When she had gone, Bob went close and turned over the huddled figure.
Torn though it was, he recognized the face of Jake Houck. To construct
the main features of the tragedy was not difficult.

While escaping from Bear Cat after the fiasco of the bank robbery, Houck
must have stumbled somehow into the hands of the Ute band still at large.
They had passed judgment on him and executed it. No doubt the wretched
man had been tied at the heels of a horse which had been lashed into a
frenzied gallop by the Indians in its rear. He had been dragged or kicked
to death by the frightened horse.

As Bob looked down into that still, disfigured face, there came to him
vividly a sense of the weakness and frailty of human nature. Not long
since this bit of lifeless clay had straddled his world like a Colossus.
To the young cowpuncher he had been a superman, terrible in his power and
capacity to do harm. Now all that vanity and egoism had vanished, blown
away as though it had never been.

Where