London to Cairo, from New York to Peking: rich, charming, clever, initiated people,—people who would always know what to do and say, she was sure of it.
If it was the natural fate of a tenderfoot that Sundown should have been lame from a rope-burn that afternoon and that his understudy should be a horse that had not been ridden since the previous summer, it was carelessness on the part of Keble Eveley that allowed the visitor to climb the perpendicular trail to the ridge in a loosely cinched saddle. In any case, when Windrom, in trying to avoid scraping a left kneecap on one pine tree, caught his right stirrup in the half fallen dead branch of another, the horse, reflecting the nervousness of his rider, began to rear in a manner that endangered his foothold on the steep slope, and almost before Keble knew that something was amiss behind him, a sudden forward motion of the horse, accompanied by a slipping motion of the saddle, threw his friend against a vicious rock which marked a bend in the trail.
Keble turned and dismounted anxiously when Windrom failed to rise. The body lay against the rock, the left arm doubled under it. Keble lifted his victim upon his own horse and after great difficulty brought him to the cottage, where an astonishingly calm Louise vetoed most of his suggestions, in-
