Unexpectedly she reached around his body and grasped the saddle horn with her left hand. A moment and she swung herself forward along the bay’s side. She had felt his hands clutching at her pocket as she threw herself from the speeding pony’s back. She alighted safely in the sand, lost her balance and pitched forward on her face.
“Hi-yi!” came Mart’s derisive shout; and like a streak of brown the snip-nose dashed away at a dead run.
Manzanita felt in her pocket. The pasteboard cover had gone on with Martin.
CHAPTER XII
BLACKY SILK
TWENTY minutes after Manzanita Canby had struggled up from the sand into which her leap from Mart’s pony had pitched her, she was throwing the silver-mounted saddle on the back of her pinto mare. She was chapped and spurred now and ready for any meeting.
The fiery little mare leaped forward at the suggestion of spurs about to touch her belly. They dashed out of the gate and sped away over the desert toward the railroad camps.
It was possible that Mart would not readily find the sheriff to show him the pasteboard cover found by the man hunters in the mountains. The sheriff had been investigating in the various camps during the greater part of the afternoon, and by this time—early evening—he must have reached a point some distance up the line. If only she could overtake her brother and in some way manage to wheedle him out of that damning bit of evidence against Halfaman Daisy and Falcon the Flunky.
She had not stopped to reason. She knew now, beyond all doubt, that she loved the flunky of the Mangan-Hatton camp, and, womanlike, she cared not who knew it nor what any one might think. Womanlike, also, she was riding now in unquestioning devotion to protect the man she loved, be he guilty or innocent. The makers of our laws were perhaps wise when they decided it to be unjust for a wife to be compelled to implicate her husband. For if the wife loves the husband it would require more than laws to make her condemn him. Blind justice for men—blind love for women!
On and on she rode, pulling up only when the pinto raced alongside the work in the camp of Jeddo the Crow, where Manzanita saw her black-haired girl friend driving a wheeler team.
Wing o’ the Crow stopped her mules when she saw her bearing down in a cloud of dust. With her pony on her haunches, Manzanita leaned from the saddle when she reached the railroad girl, and asked excitedly: