Across the valley below her she could see the figure of a solitary horseman, which, after a few moments she decided to be Cameron, although she had thought him miles away from there by this time. Her pony having recovered his wind, she started down the mesa toward the approaching figure, glad to see some human being in all that waste of loneliness around her. As she drew nearer, she saw that it was no white man, but an Indian, the red sash tied around his head being plainly visible at quite a distance, but undaunted, she kept on her course, presuming him to be the Indian mail-carrier who came in from the agency twice a week with the mail-sack tied behind his saddle.
As the distance between them lessened, she saw with great uneasiness that it was her admirer, Chatto, and, with a sort of guilty fear in her heart, she turned off the trail and pushed her pony into a lope toward a bunch of horses grazing near, as if she wanted to look at them closer. A glance over her shoulder showed her that the Indian had also turned and was following her, and the girl, now thoroughly alarmed, urged her pony to his fullest speed. The Indian called to her to stop, but she only rode the harder. Chatto, however, was well mounted and slowly gained on the flying figure; her cowboy hat had blown from her head, but was held by the string around her neck as she urged her pony with voice and quirt.
"Stop, I shoot!" called the Navajo, but she rode the faster, expecting every instant to hear the crack of his Winchester. At last he was within thirty feet of her, and she felt that her pony had done his utmost and there was no escape. Another look over her shoulder showed her that the Indian had taken down his long rawhide reata and was swinging it round and round his head preparatory for a throw at her. She remembered hearing Hull tell of Mexican and cowboy fights, where the victim was roped and pulled off his horse and across the prairie, until every semblance of human shape was dragged out of it, and her heart sank within her, for she knew by some woman's instinct that he had realized she had been fooling him, and was thirsting for revenge.
Faster and faster they rode, and nearer and nearer he drew, till she could hear the "swish" of the rope through the air; she crouched low over the saddle to offer as small a mark as possible, meantime praying for deliverance, which in her heart she little thought would come.
Cameron found his horses but a few miles out from the ranch, and, quickly rounding them up, started the bunch toward home on a sharp run, arriving there not long after Miss Steele had left. Questioning Mary as to the direction she had taken, he struck off again on the range in a course that he shrewdly judged would enable him, as if by accident, to meet Miss Steele on her homeward way.
Some three or four miles from the ranch the mesa he was crossing ended abruptly in a cliff some two hundred feet high, which extended for several miles in an unbroken line with but one or two places where an animal could get up or down. The view from the edge of this cliff or "rim rock," as it was more commonly called, over the wide valley spread out below it for miles and miles was unexcelled, and Cameron, knowing that Miss Steele must come up this cliff at one of two places, headed for the one he felt she would be most likely to take. As he drew near the edge of the mesa he left the trail and rode over to the cliff; and thinking perhaps to surprise a bunch of antelope feeding quietly in the valley below him, as well as to prevent Miss Steele from first seeing him, should she chance to be below, he left his pony under a cedar and, taking his Winchester in his hand, carefully walked up to the edge of the cliff.
The road leading down to the valley ran close under the cliff and was lost to sight around a point of the mesa but a short distance to his right. Carefully scanning the prairie, he could see no one, but, from the way three or four bunches of wild horses were tearing across the valley below him, he felt satisfied, that either she or some one else had started them, and concluded to wait a few moments.
Suddenly, from far below, came a sound that for an instant sent his heart to his throat, for it seemed as if he heard a woman's voice, borne upward from around the point to his right, and yet it was far more likely to be the almost human cry of a mountain lion, or even the childish yell of some lone coyote, either of which could readily be mistaken for a female voice in distress. As Cameron stood there, fairly holding his breath in his eagerness to catch the faintest sound from below, one moment assuring himself that his ears were at fault and the next so certain that it was a woman's voice that he could scarcely wait for its repetition in order that he could be sure which way to go, once again there came faintly and yet more definitely than before the cry of distress. The voice was Miss Steele's, and before he was really sure from which quarter it came, there burst into sight around the point of the mesa, not a quarter of a mile away from him but down in the valley, the figure of a girl on horseback leaning low over her pony's neck, and urging him to his utmost speed on the road leading up to the cliff, while some forty or fifty feet behind her, riding as hard as she was the Navajo Chatto, his red head-band gone, his long black hair streaming out in the wind, and whirling over his head in a great loop his rawhide reata.
It took Cameron but an instant to grasp the situation and see that the Indian had tried to overtake the girl, and failing, meant to rope and drag her from her horse. He quickly saw also that busied with his reata, and not having a chance to use the quirt, his pony was falling slightly behind, for the Navajos seldom wear spurs, and the girl was not sparing her pony's flanks, but was using her quirt at every jump. Cameron's first impulse was to spring down the cliff, and run to her aid, but with a groan he realized that it would take him too long to do this, for it was only by careful climbing that one could get down the first forty or fifty feet of the wall, and then the rest would be slow traveling at the very best. The race below him was in plain view now, and in a few rods more they would pass out of his sight in the little side cañon through which the road led up to the top of the cliff. To ride back to that place would take too long, also, and the man quickly realized that it was no time to delay.
To kill a Navajo meant trouble for everybody around, for the whole tribe would take it up, and wreak vengeance upon any white settlers they could find, hence that was not to be thought of except in the last extremity. But Cameron knew that he could kill the Navajo's pony and save the girl. Throwing his Winchester over a rock for a rest, with a mental estimate of five hundred yards' distance to his mark, he took careful aim at the shoulder of the Indian's pony and sent a shot which sped fair and true to its mark, the animal rolling headlong in the dirt, and the rider sprawling fully twenty feet away, but unharmed.