She
closed her eyes and shuddered. A loose piece of rock on the narrow
trail, a stumble, and--she could feel herself whirling down, down,
down. It was the voice of the Texan--confident, firm, reassuring--that
brought her once more to her senses.
"It's all right. Just follow right along. Shut your eyes, or keep 'em
to the wall. We're half-way up. It ain't so steep from here on, an'
she widens toward the top. I'm dizzy-headed, too, in high places an' I
shut mine. Just give the horse a loose rein an' he'll keep the trail.
There ain't nowhere else for him to go."
With a deadly fear in her heart, the girl fastened her eyes upon the
cowboy's back and gave her horse his head. And as she rode she
wondered at this man who unhesitatingly risked his life upon the word
of a horse-thief.
Almost before she realized it the ordeal was over and her horse was
following its leader through a sparse grove of bull pine. The ascent
was still rather sharp, and the way strewn with boulders, and fallen
trees, but the awful precipice, with its sheer drop of many hundreds of
feet to the black rocks below, no longer yawned at her stirrup's edge,
and it was with a deep-drawn breath of relief that she allowed her eyes
once again to travel out over the vast sweep of waste toward the west
where the moon hung low and red above the distant rim of the bad lands.
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