As she spoke the horse threw up his head and stared at her, ears pointed inquiringly. When Freckles nickered, the strange animal gave an answering whinny, but did not move.
Puzzled and a little nervous, Mary glanced sharply to right and left amongst the scattered rocks. In her experience a saddled horse meant that the owner was 214 not far away; but she could see no signs of any one, and at length, taking courage from the silence, she rode slowly forward.
As she came closer the horse backed away a foot or two and half turned, exposing a brand on his shoulder. The girl stared at it with a puckered frown, wondering what on earth any one from the Rocking-R was doing here. Then her glance strayed to the saddle, flittered indifferently over cantle and skirts, to pause abruptly, with a sudden keen attention, on the flap of the right-hand pocket, which bore the initials “R. S.” cut with some skill on the smooth leather.
With eyes widening, the girl bent forward, studying the flap intently. She was not mistaken; the initials were R. S., and in a flash there came back to her a memory of that afternoon, which seemed so long ago, when she and Buck Green rode out together to the south pasture. She had noticed those initials then on his saddle-pocket, and knowing how unusual it was for a cow-man to touch his precious saddle with a knife, she made some casual comment, and learned how it had come into Buck’s possession.
What did it mean? What was he doing here on a Rocking-R horse? Above all, where was he?
Suddenly her heart began to beat unevenly and her frightened eyes stared down the gulch to where an out-thrust buttress provokingly hid the greater part of it from view. Her glance shifted again to the 215 horse, who stood motionless, regarding her with liquid, intelligent eyes, and for the first time she noticed that the ends of the trailing reins were scratched and torn and ragged.
How still the place was! She fumbled in her blouse, and drawing forth a handkerchief, passed it mechanically over her damp forehead. Then abruptly her slight figure straightened, and tightening the reins she urged Freckles along the rock-strewn bottom of the gulch.
The distance to the rocky buttress seemed at once interminable and incredibly short. As she reached it she held her breath and her teeth dug into her colorless lips. But when another section of the winding gorge lay before her, silent, empty save for scattered boulders and a few scanty bits of stunted vegetation, one small, gloved hand fluttered to her breast, then dropped, clenched, against the saddle-horn.
A rounded mass of rock, fallen in ages past from the cliffs above, blocked her path, and mechanically the girl reined Freckles around it. An instant later the horse stopped of his own accord, and the girl found herself staring down with horror-stricken eyes at the body of a man stretched out on the further side of the boulders. Motionless he lay there, a long length of brown chaps and torn, disordered shirt. His face was hidden in his crooked arms; the tumbled mass of brown hair was matted with ominous dark 216 clots. But in that single, stricken second Mary Thorne knew whom she had found.
“Oh!” she choked, fighting desperately against a wave of faintness that threatened to overwhelm her. “O-h!”