om side to side that he might watch the thing that menaced
him, heedless of the fact that danger might lie ahead of him also.
Lorraine knew that he was running senselessly, that he might leave the
trail at any bend and go rolling into the canyon.

A sense of unreality seized her. It could not be deadly earnest, she
thought. It was so exactly like some movie thrill, planned carefully in
advance, rehearsed perhaps under the critical eye of the director, and
done now with the camera man turning calmly the little crank and
counting the number of film feet the scene would take. A little farther
and she would be out of the scene, and men stationed ahead would ride up
and stop her horse for her and tell her how well she had "put it over."

She looked over her shoulder and saw them still coming. It was real. It
was terribly real, the way that team was fleeing down the grade. She had
never seen anything like that before, never seen horses so frantically
trying to run from the swaying load behind them. Always, she had been
accustomed to moderation in the pace and a slowed camera to speed up the
action on the screen. Yellowjacket, too--she had never ridden at that
terrific speed down hill. Twice she lost a stirrup and grabbed the
saddle horn to save herself from going over his head.

They neared a sharp turn, and it took all her strength to pull her horse
to the inside and save him from plunging off down the canyon's side. The
nose of the hill hid for a moment her dad, and in that moment she heard
a crash and knew what had happened. But she could not stop; Yellowjacket
had his ears laid back flat on his senseless head, and the bit clamped
tight in his teeth.

She heard the crash repeated in diminuendo farther down in the canyon.
There was no longer the rattle of the wagon coming down the trail, the
sharp staccato of pounding hoofs.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

SWAN TALKS WITH HIS THOUGHTS

Lorraine, following instinct rather than thought, pulled Yellowjacket
into the first opening that presented itself. This was a narrow, rather
precipitous gully that seamed the slope just beyond the bend. The bushes
there whipped her head and shoulders cruelly as the horse forged in
among them, but they trapped him effectually where the gully narrowed to
a point. He stopped perforce, and Lorraine was out of the saddle and
running down to the trail before she quite realized what she was doing.

At the bend she looked down, saw the marks where