“I’ll have to leave you if I’m to catch that buckskin before it gets dark, stranger. You’ll get along all right?” she added.
“Surest thing you know!”
She dropped the rope. He gathered it in quickly and then uttered a cheerful shout.
“All clear?” asked Helen.
“Don’t worry about me. I’m all right,” he assured her.
Helen leaped back to her waiting pony. Already the golden light was dying out of the sky. Up here in the foothills the “evening died hard” as the saying is; but the buckskin pony had romped clear across the plateau. He was now, indeed, out of sight.
She whirled Rose about and set off at a gallop after the runaway. It was not until then that she remembered she had no rope. That buckskin would have to be fairly run down. There would be no roping him.
“But if you can’t do it, no other horsie can,” she said, aloud, patting the Rose pony on her arching neck. “Go it, girl! Let’s see if we can’t beat any miserable little buckskin that ever came into this country. A strawberry roan forever!”
Her “E-e-e-yow! yow!” awoke the pony to desperate endeavor. She seemed to merely skim the dry grass of the open plateau, and in ten minutes Helen saw a riderless mount plunging up the side of a coulée far ahead.
“There he goes!” cried the girl. “After him, Rosie! Make your pretty hoofs fly!”