He dragged himself into a sitting posture. He was evidently feeling stronger and looked much more like himself.
“Try and get back to that camp of mine I told you 223 of,” he explained. “I reckon I’ll have to lay up there a while, but there’s food a-plenty, and a good spring, so—”
“But I don’t believe you can even stand,” she protested. “And if your ribs are broken—”
“Likely it’s only one and I can strap that good and tight with a piece of my shirt or something. Then if you could catch Pete and bring him over here, I’ll manage to climb into the saddle some way. It’s only three or four miles, and the going’s not so very bad.”
She made no further protest, but her lips straightened firmly and there was a look of decision in her girlish face as she set about helping him with his preparations.
It was she who tore a broad band from his flannel shirt, roughly fringed the ends with Buck’s knife and tied it so tightly about his body that he had hard work to keep from wincing. She insisted on bandaging his head, and while he rested in the shade went back into the gulch to look for his hat and the Colt that had fallen from his holster.
She finally found them both under a narrow ledge that thrust out a dozen feet below the edge of the trail. A stunted bush, rooted deep in some hidden crevice, grew up before it, and, staring upward at it, the girl guessed that to this little bush alone Buck owed his life. He had been able to give her no further details of his descent, but she saw that it would 224 be possible for a man to crawl along the narrow ledge to where another crossed it at a descending angle, and thence gain the bottom of the gulch.
“I wonder how he ever came to fall,” she murmured, remembering how wide the trail was at the summit.
Returning, however, she asked no questions. In the face of what lay before her, the matter seemed trivial and unimportant. She caught the Rocking-R horse without much trouble and led him back to a broad, flat boulder on which Buck had managed to crawl. Obliged to hold the animal, whose slightest movement might prove disastrous, she could give no further aid, but was forced to stand helpless, watching with troubled, sympathetic eyes the man’s painful struggles to gain the saddle. When at last he succeeded and slumped there, mouth twisted and face bathed in perspiration, her knees were shaking and she felt limp and nerveless.
“We’ll stop at the spring first for more water,” she said, pulling herself together with an effort.