Frank looked again. Jack was going to face death squarely, or else to drive her pony across the bull's course, before it reached her. Yet the last method seemed hopeless, because the pony was master of the race, not Jack. The girl had stooped low in her saddle. Her feet were out of the stirrups and she lay almost flat across the pony's back. She seemed to slip to one side. Frank watched for another horrified second. Jack and her horse were not a hundred feet from the bull.
Then something slid along the ground on the right side of the pony, ran a few feet, let go of the bridle and sat down limply in the brown grass.
Frank shouted as he had never thought it in him to shout. The trick of dropping from her horse that Jack had just effected, he had seen accomplished once in a Buffalo Bill show in London. The vision of a girl doing it for her own safety was the most thrilling sight he had ever seen in his life.
Tricks, deserted by her rider, and uncertain what she should do alone, sprang to one side as the bull lunged at her, and the danger was all over in an instant.
Frank found Jack shaking like one in a chill. But she smiled at him bravely and put out her hand to let him pull her off the ground.
"Perhaps, Frank," she said, forgetting formalities in her thankfulness, "if I live long enough, I may some day learn to do what I am told. Please take me back to Olive."
Tricks, exhausted by her wild run, was led back to Jack, a weary and repentant pony.
Jack was silent and shaken. She followed Frank back to the spot where they had left Olive, without a word.
The cowboys were returning to the work of branding the cattle and it was high time the ranch girls started for home. But neither Jack nor Frank could find a trace of Olive. She had completely disappeared. They rode over to the spot where they had lunched with Mr. and Mrs. Simpson, but the automobile party had left for their ranch. Frank inquired of a dozen cowboys. No one of them had seen Olive.
Jack tried not to cry, but the day's experiences had been too much for her. She had never been so utterly wretched before.