ver on them. I'll bank on you after
to-night, sure thing!"

She turned a laughing face toward him. "Thank you!" she said. "But I
don't see how you know all that. I'm sure I didn't do anything
particularly nervy. There wasn't anything else to do but what I did, if
I'd tried."

"Most girls would have fainted and screamed, and fainted again when they
were rescued," stated the Boy, out of a vast experience.

"I never fainted in my life," said Margaret Earle, with disdain. "I
don't think I should care to faint out in the vast universe like this.
It would be rather inopportune, I should think."

Then, because she suddenly realized that she was growing very chummy
with this stranger in the dark, she asked the first question that came
into her head.

"What was your college?"

That he had not been to college never entered her head. There was
something in his speech and manner that made it a foregone conclusion.

It was as if she had struck him forcibly in his face, so sudden and
sharp a silence ensued for a second. Then he answered, gruffly, "Yale,"
and plunged into an elaborate account of Arizona in its early ages,
including a detailed description of the cliff-dwellers and their homes,
which were still to be seen high in the rocks of the canons not many
miles to the west of where they were riding.

Margaret was keen to hear it all, and asked many questions, declaring
her intention of visiting those cliff-caves at her earliest opportunity.
It was so wonderful to her to be actually out here where were all sorts
of queer things about which she had read and wondered. It did not occur
to her, until the next day, to realize that her companion had of
intention led her off the topic of himself and kept her from asking any
more personal questions.

He told her of the petrified forest just over some low hills off to the
left; acres and acres of agatized chips and trunks of great trees all
turned to eternal stone, called by the Indians "Yeitso's bones," after
the great giant of that name whom an ancient Indian hero killed. He
described the coloring of the brilliant days in Arizona, where you stand
on the edge of some flat-topped mesa and look off through the clear air
to mountains that seem quite near by, but are in reality more than two
hundred miles away. He pictured the strange colors and lights of the
place; ledges of rock, yellow, white and green, drab and maroon, and
tumbled piles of red boulders, shadowy buttes in the di