ed strand of the barbed steel
had been left lying in the high grass where some careless repairsman had
indolently flung it, and the horse had become hopelessly entangled in
its trap. Scared and anguished by the ripping barbs, the horse was
plunging madly about in his attempt to free himself from its cruel
fetters, momentarily approaching a greater danger, as in his struggles
he neared a high cut bank of the arroyo traversing the pasture.

At that shrill scream of "Ken! Ken!" the man whirled his horse about and
looked inquiringly in their direction; one lightning-like glance and he
sent the rowells home hard into the flank of the roan, which left the
ground in one mighty leap. Over the intervening twenty rods he came like
a thunderbolt, clearing the dividing fence by a good two feet as
Douglass lifted him to the jump and gaining the side of the plunging
horse just as the bank's edge crumbled under its feet.

He was not one moment too soon, for as his arm encircled Constance's
waist, her horse went floundering down to a broken neck on the rocks
thirty feet below. Even then for a few moments the issue was in doubt;
Mrs. Brevoort was an exceedingly well-nurtured young woman, and one
hundred and forty pounds of limp humanity is difficult to sustain with
one arm while on the back of a horse struggling to retain his footing
on the treacherous edge of a loose-earth precipice. But that arm had the
strength of a steel bar, and its possessor was the best horseman in a
land where all men rode for a living. Inside of ten seconds he was
dismounting in safety, still holding the fainting woman with that one
clasping arm.

As he touched the ground he placed the other arm around her
supportingly, her weight for the first time telling on him. On his
snatching her out of the saddle she had instinctively thrown her arms
about his neck, and they were still there; her head lay drooped upon his
shoulder and her loosened hair, whipping in the fresh breeze, was
stinging his cheek and blinding his eyes as Grace rode up and flung
herself from the saddle. There was a suggestiveness in the pose of the
two that went to her heart with a pang: they looked so lover-like, this
man with his arms about the clinging woman. For five long months she had
been schooling her heart to resignation in the conviction that they
would never meet in the flesh again, and here he had come back to
her--with another woman in his arms. In that moment she hated Constance