er young brother; but a run like this across an
illimitable space, on a creature of speed like the wind, goaded by fear
and knowing the limitations of his rider, was a different matter. The
swift flight took her breath away, and unnerved her. She tried to hold
on to the saddle with her shaking hands, for the bridle was already
flying loose to the breeze, but her hold seemed so slight that each
moment she expected to find herself lying huddled on the plain with the
pony far in the distance.

Her lips grew white and cold; her breath came short and painfully; her
eyes were strained with trying to look ahead at the constantly receding
horizon. Was there no end? Would they never come to a human habitation?
Would no one ever come to her rescue? How long could a pony stand a pace
like this? And how long could she hope to hold on to the furious flying
creature?

Off to the right at last she thought she saw a building. It seemed hours
they had been flying through space. In a second they were close by it.
It was a cabin, standing alone upon the great plain with sage-brush in
patches about the door and a neat rail fence around it.

She could see one window at the end, and a tiny chimney at the back.
Could it be that any one lived in such a forlorn spot?

Summoning all her strength as they neared the spot she flung her voice
out in a wild appeal while the pony hurled on, but the wind caught the
feeble effort and flung it away into the vast spaces like a little torn
worthless fragment of sound.

Tears stung their way into her wide dry eyes. The last hairpin left its
mooring and slipped down to earth. The loosened golden hair streamed
back on the wind like hands of despair wildly clutching for help, and
the jaunty green riding cap was snatched by the breeze and hung upon a
sage-bush not fifty feet from the cabin gate, but the pony rushed on
with the frightened girl still clinging to the saddle.

II

THE MAN

About noon of the same day the missionary halted his horse on the edge
of a great flat-topped mesa and looked away to the clear blue mountains
in the distance.

John Brownleigh had been in Arizona for nearly three years, yet the
wonder of the desert had not ceased to charm him, and now as he stopped
his horse to rest, his eyes sought the vast distances stretched in every
direction, and revelled in the splendour of the scene.

Those mountains at which he was gazing were more than a hundred miles
from him, and