tiff leather had broken the shock of the blow
from the steel jaws. Otherwise the force of the released spring must
have shattered her ankle.

"I can't quite open the trap," she explained. "If you will help me--"

Roy put his weight on the springs and removed the pressure of the jaws.
The girl drew out her numb leg. She straightened herself, swayed, and
clutched blindly at him. Next moment her body relaxed and she was
unconscious in his arms.

He laid her on the moss and looked about for water. There was some in
his canteen, but that was attached to the saddle on the top of the
bluff. For present purposes it might as well have been at the North
Pole. He could not leave her while she was like this. But since he
had to be giving some first aid, he drew from her foot the boot that
had been in the steel trap, so as to relieve the ankle.

Her eyelids fluttered, she gave a deep sigh, and looked with a
perplexed doubt upon the world to which she had just returned.

"You fainted," Roy told her by way of explanation.

The young woman winced and looked at her foot. The angry color flushed
into her cheeks. Her annoyance was at herself, but she visited it upon
him.

"Who told you to take off my boot?"

"I thought it might help the pain."

She snatched up the boot and started to pull it on, but gave this up
with a long breath that was almost a groan.

"I'm a nice kind of a baby," she jeered.

"It must hurt like sixty," he ventured. Then, after momentary
hesitation: "You'd better let me bind up your ankle. I have water in
my canteen. I'll run up and get some as soon as I'm through."

There was something of sullen suspicion in the glance her dark eyes
flashed at him.

"You can get me water if you want to," she told him, a little
ungraciously.

He understood that his offer to tie up the ankle had been refused.
When he returned with his horse twenty minutes later, he knew why she
had let him go for the water. It had been the easiest way to get rid
of him for the time. The fat bulge beneath her stocking showed that
she had taken advantage of his absence to bind the bruised leg herself.

"Is it better now--less painful?" he asked.

She dismissed his sympathy with a curt little nod. "I'm the biggest
fool in Washington County. We've been setting traps for wolves.
They've been getting our lambs. I jumped off my horse right into this
one. Blacky is a skittish colt and when the trap went off, he bolted."