ride any more... for a few days, anyway, or for a
week. What did you say was his name?"

"Comanche," he answered. "I know you will like him."

* * *

Chris lay on his back, his head propped by the bare jutting wall of
stone, his gaze attentively directed across the canyon to the opposing
tree-covered slope. There was a sound of crashing through underbrush,
the ringing of steel-shod hoofs on stone, and an occasional and mossy
descent of a dislodged boulder that bounded from the hill and fetched
up with a final splash in the torrent that rushed over a wild chaos of
rocks beneath him. Now and again he caught glimpses, framed in green
foliage, of the golden brown of Lute's corduroy riding-habit and of the
bay horse that moved beneath her.

She rode out into an open space where a loose earth-slide denied
lodgement to trees and grass. She halted the horse at the brink of the
slide and glanced down it with a measuring eye. Forty feet beneath,
the slide terminated in a small, firm-surfaced terrace, the banked
accumulation of fallen earth and gravel.

"It's a good test," she called across the canyon. "I'm going to put him
down it."

The animal gingerly launched himself on the treacherous footing,
irregularly losing and gaining his hind feet, keeping his fore
legs stiff, and steadily and calmly, without panic or nervousness,
extricating the fore feet as fast as they sank too deep into the sliding
earth that surged along in a wave before him. When the firm footing
at the bottom was reached, he strode out on the little terrace with a
quickness and springiness of gait and with glintings of muscular fires
that gave the lie to the calm deliberation of his movements on the
slide.

"Bravo!" Chris shouted across the canyon, clapping his hands.

"The wisest-footed, clearest-headed horse I ever saw," Lute called back,
as she turned the animal to the side and dropped down a broken slope of
rubble and into the trees again.

Chris followed her by the sound of her progress, and by occasional
glimpses where the foliage was more open, as she zigzagged down the
steep and trailless descent. She emerged below him at the rugged rim
of the torrent, dropped the horse down a three-foot wall, and halted to
study the crossing.

Four feet out in the stream, a narrow ledge thrust above the surface of
the water. Beyond the ledge boiled an angry pool. But to the left, from
the ledge, and several feet lower, was a tiny bed of gra