"In a blind pocket. Yes, ma'am! Criminy! I couldn't believe it myself. I says to me: 'Tom Collins! your cinches is slipped. That's what is the matter.'
"But you know, Miss Rhody," he added to the ranchman's daughter, "your pa don't allow nothing stronger than spring water on the ranch. I was as sober as a Greaser judge trying his brother-in-law for hawse stealin'. That's what!
"That old black capering Satan went flying up that gulch; and me, I pulled my little roan in after him and got my rope coiled. I says to me: 'You ain't astride nothin' but a little roan goat that only knows cows; but you got the chancet of your life, Tom Collins, to make a killin'. That's right!'
"That is a twisty gulch—I'll show it to you while we're up here prospectin'—and all I could hear was old Blackie's hoofs clattering, and once in a while he'd whistle. He's got a neigh like a steam whistle.
"Well," pursued the cowboy, "all of a sudden the noise stopped. I couldn't hear his hoofs nor his voice. And when I got around the next turn that give me a sight of the complete gulch, clear to the pocket, there wasn't no hawse at all. He'd just gone up in smoke, or something. That's what!"
"What became of the horse?" cried Bess Harley.
"There's some joke in it," Rhoda said doubtfully.
"Honest to pickles!" said the cowpuncher earnestly, "I was scared blue myself. I ain't no more superstitious than the next feller. But that certainly got me.
"I rid back to the mouth of the gulch, lookin' all the way, and never seen a hoof print to show me where he'd lighted out for. He couldn't climb the sides of the gulch. And he didn't hide out on me and let me go back and then dodge out o' the gulch.
"No, sir! There he was one minute, then the next he wasn't there at all. I got back to the mouth of the gulch, and there I seen that old tornado a-comin'. You folks had passed me and 'scaped my attention.