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 her arms around the animal's neck, drawing its head to her bosom, fondling it, murmuring and exclaiming, as she might have caressed a lost child.

"You've got your nerve," she flashed up at the mudspattered rider, "coming here on my horse!"

"It would seem so," Tom Simpson replied. "But my intentions are honorable, miss, in spite of my appearance. I got separated from Mr. Coburn and the others during a little—a little mêlée in Drumwell last night. By inadvertence I took his horse. I am a stranger in this country, miss; I trusted the horse to come home, which he appears to have done."

The girl looked at him, the color fading out of her face, her eyes widening, her mouth standing open, amazement on every feature, as he calmly told this little story. She was holding the horse by the bit, so firmly her knuckles were white in their grip, and her breath was coming fast.

"Yes, he came home all right," she said, so coldly, so severely, so accusingly, that Tom Simpson began to think something had gone wrong.

"Then this is the Bar-Heart-Bar ranch?" Simpson said hopefully, more hopefully than he felt, throwing his stiff leg over, coming down out of the saddle like a wooden man.

"This is the Block E," she put him right with cold contumely.

"It's the horse's mistake, ma'am—miss—, not mine," said Simpson, feeling very much like the thief she doubtless took him for, or at least an accessory after the fact.