u. And your
father and mother need you awfully bad, Buck. They've been looking all
over for you, everywhere, and wishing you'd come home."

Buck looked wistfully up and down the canyon. His face at that moment
was not the face of a real old cowpuncher, but the sweet, dirty,
mother-hungry face of a child. "It's a far ways," he said plaintively.
"It's a million miles, I guess I wanted to go home, but I couldn't des'
'zactly 'member--and I thought I could find the bunch, and they'd know
the trail better. Do you know the trail?"

Miss Allen evaded that question and the Kid's wide, wistful eyes. "I
think if we start out, Buck, we can find it. We must go toward the sun,
now. That will be towards home. Shall I put you on your horse?"

The Kid gave her a withering glance and squirmed up into the saddle with
the help of both horn and cantle and by the grace of good luck. Miss
Allen gasped while she watched him.

The Kid looked down at her triumphantly. He frowned a little and flushed
guiltily when he remembered something. "'Scuse me," he said. "I guess
you better ride my horse. I guess I better walk. It ain't p'lite for
ladies to walk and men ride."

"No, no!" Miss Allen reached up with both hands and held the Kid from
dismounting. "I'll walk, Buck. I'd rather. I--why, I wouldn't dare ride
that horse of yours. I'd be afraid he might buck me off." She pinched
her eyebrows together and pursed up her lips in a most convincing
manner.

"Hunh!" Scorn of her cowardice was in his tone. "Well, a course I ain't
scared to ride him."

So with Miss Allen walking close to the Kid's stirrup and trying her
best to keep up and to be cheerful and to remember that she must not
treat him like a little, lost boy but like a real old cowpuncher,
they started up the canyon toward the sun which hung low above a dark,
pine-covered hill.

CHAPTER 19. HER NAME WAS ROSEMARY

Andy Green came in from a twenty-hour ride through the Wolf Butte
country and learned that another disaster had followed on the heels of
the first; that miss Allen had been missing for thirty-six hours. While
he bolted what food was handiest in the camp where old Patsy cooked for
the searchers, and the horse wrangler brought up the saddle-bunch just
as though it was a roundup that held here its headquarters, he heard all
that Slim and Cal Emmett could tell him about the disappearance of Miss
Allen.

One fact stood significantly in the foreground, and that was that Pink