As to the fact of the trail the wandering tale-bearer was not at fault. On the most perfect of the late-in-August mornings a young woman, clad in serviceable khaki, and keeping her cowboy Stetson and buff top-boots in good countenance by riding astride in a man's saddle, was pushing her mount up the trail toward Sunrise Gulch. From the top of a little rise the abandoned camp came into view, its heaps of worked-over gravel sprouting thickly with the wild growth of twenty years, and its crumbling shacks, only one of which seemed to have survived in habitable entirety, scattered among the firs of the gulch.
At the top of the rise the horsewoman drew rein and shaded her eyes with a gauntleted hand. On a bench beside the door of the single tenanted cabin a man was sitting, and she saw him stand to answer her hand-wave. A few minutes later the man, a gaunt young fellow with one arm in a sling and the pallor of a long confinement whitening his face and hands, was trying to help the horsewoman to dismount in the cabin dooryard, but she pushed him aside and swung out of the saddle unaided, laughing at him out of a pair of slate-gray eyes and saying: "How often have I got to tell you that you simply can't help a woman out of a man's saddle?"
The man smiled at that.
"It's automatic," he returned. "I shall never get over wanting to help you, I guess. Have you come to tell me that I can go?"
Flinging the bridle-reins over the head of the wiry little cow-pony which was thus left free to crop the short, sweet grass of the creek valley, the young woman led the man to the house bench and made him sit down.
"You are frightfully anxious to go and commit suicide, aren't you?" she teased, sitting beside him. "Every time I come it's always the same thing: 'When can I go?' You're not well yet."
"I'm well enough to do what I've got to do, Corona; and until it's done.... Besides, there is Jibbey."
"Where is Mr. Jibbey this morning?"
"He has gone up the creek, fishing. I made him go. If I didn't take a club to him now and then he'd hang over me all the time. There never was another man like him, Corona. And at home we used to call him 'the black sheep' and 'the failure,' and cross the street to dodge him when he'd been drinking too much!"
"He says you've made a man of him; that you saved his life when you had every reason not to. You never told me that, John."