Page:Edward Ellis--Alden the Pony Express Rider.djvu/244

 was not a dead run. That would come very soon.

The observant Alden noted one fact: the horse did not take the course which he was following when alarmed by the approach of the black bear. He veered well to the left, thus leaving the carcass out of sight in the other direction. His kind dread a dead bear almost as much as a live one.

The action of Dick confirmed what his new master had suspected from the first: the route to the station was not over a single, narrow trail to which the riders confined themselves, but covered an area that gave wide latitude. That he took the path which was taken by the man who saved him from the bear was one of those providential occurrences that are more common in this life than most people believe.

The emigrant trains were disposed to keep to certain paths, where the face of the country compelled a closing in, but in other sections the respective courses were separated by miles, and, as has been shown the parties plodding across the plains, even though their routes were parallel, were often so far apart that for days they saw nothing of one another. Even