tent upon immediate
prevention, if possible, of any further ordeals undertaken in behalf of
herself. She was thoroughly frightened. A prescience of something
ominous impending seemed to grip her very heart. She glanced about,
helplessly, unfamiliar with the place. Van was nowhere in sight. She
started to run around the cabin when Gettysburg appeared in her path.

"Well, well," said he nervously, "now who'd a-thought you'd finished
eatin'?"

"Oh please," she said, "please go tell Mr. Van I'd rather he wouldn't
attempt to ride _any_ horse again to-day. Will you please go tell him
that?"

"You bet your patent leathers!" said Gettysburg. "You just go over and
globe-trot the quartz-mill while I'm gone, and we'll fix things right
in a shake."

He strode off in haste. Beth watched him go. She made no move towards
the quartz-mill, which Gettysburg had indicated, over on the slope.

She soon grew restive, awaiting his return. Elsa came out and sat
down. The old miner failed to reappear.

At length, unable to endure any longer her feeling of alarm and
suspense, Beth resolutely followed where Gettysburg had gone, and soon
came in sight of the stable and high corral. Then her heart struck a
blow of excitement in her breast, and her knees began to weaken beneath
her.

CHAPTER VI

THE BATTLE

Too late to interfere in the struggle about to be enacted, the girl
stood rigidly beside a great red pine tree, fixing her gaze upon Van,
on whose heels, as he walked, jingled a glinting pair of spurs.

From the small corral he was leading forth as handsome an animal as
Beth had ever seen, already saddled, bridled--and blindfolded. The
horse was a chestnut, magnificently sculptured and muscled. He was of
medium size, and as trim and hard as a nail. His coat fairly glistened
in the sun.

Despite his beauty there was something about him that betokened menace.
It was not altogether that the men all stood away--all save Van--nor
yet that the need for a blindfold argued danger in his composition.
There was something acutely disquieting in the backward folding of his
ears, the quiver of his sinews, the reluctant manner of his stepping.

Beth did not and could not know that an "outlaw" is a horse so utterly
abandoned to ways of broncho crime and equine deviltry that no man is
able to break him--that having conquered man after man, perhaps even
with fatal results to his riders, he has become absolutely depraved and