s own
good horsemanship and better knowledge of the ground, he darted out of
the cavalcade to overtake her.

But the unfortunate result of this was to give further impulse to the
now racing horses as they approached a point where the slope terminated
in two diverging canyons. Mrs. Ashwood gave a sharp pull upon her
bit. To her consternation the mustang stopped short almost
instantly,--planting his two fore feet rigidly in the dust and even
sliding forward with the impetus. Had her seat been less firm she might
have been thrown, but she recovered herself, although in doing so
she still bore upon the bit, when to her astonishment the mustang
deliberately stiffened himself as if for a shock, and then began to back
slowly, quivering with excitement. She did not know that her native-bred
animal fondly believed that he was participating in a rodeo, and that to
his equine intelligence his fair mistress had just lassoed something!
In vain she urged him forward; he still waited for the shock! When the
cloud of dust in which she had been enwrapped drifted away, she saw to
her amazement that she was alone. The entire party had disappeared into
one of the canyons,--but which one she could not tell!

When she succeeded at last in urging her mustang forward again she
determined to take the right-hand canyon and trust to being either met
or overtaken. A more practical and less adventurous nature would have
waited at the point of divergence for the return of some of the party,
but Mrs. Ashwood was, in truth, not sorry to be left to herself and the
novel scenery for a while, and she had no doubt but she would eventually
find her way to the hotel at San Mateo, which could not be far away, in
time for luncheon.

The road was still well defined, although it presently began to wind
between ascending ranks of pines and larches that marked the terraces
of hills, so high that she wondered she had not noticed them from the
plains. An unmistakable suggestion of some haunting primeval solitude,
a sense of the hushed and mysterious proximity of a nature she had never
known before, the strange half-intoxicating breath of unsunned foliage
and untrodden grasses and herbs, all combined to exalt her as she
cantered forward. Even her horse seemed to have acquired an intelligent
liberty, or rather to have established a sympathy with her in his needs
and her own longings; instinctively she no longer pulled him with the
curb; the reins hung loosely on h