She expected to see the man crushed and bleeding on some rock below.
Perhaps he had rolled clear to the bottom.
But as her swift gaze searched the face of the bluff, there was no rock, splotched with red, in her line of vision. Then she saw something in the top of one of the trees, far down.
It was the yellow handkerchief which the stranger had worn. It fluttered in the evening breeze like a flag of distress.
"E-e-e-_yow!_" cried Helen, making a horn of her hands as she leaned over the edge of the precipice, and uttering the puncher"s signal call.
"E-e-e-_yow!_" came up a faint reply.
She saw the green top of the tree stir. Then a face--scratched and streaked with blood--appeared.
"For the love of heaven!" called a thin voice. "Get somebody with a rope.
I"ve got to have some help."
"I have a rope right here. Pa.s.s it under your arms, and I"ll swing you out of that tree-top," replied Helen, promptly.
She jumped up and went to the pony. Her rope--she would no more think of traveling without it than would one of the Sunset punchers--was coiled at the saddlebow.
Running back to the verge of the bluff she planted her feet on a firm boulder and dropped the coil into the depths. In a moment it was in the hands of the man below.
"Over your head and shoulders!" she cried.
"You can never hold me!" he called back, faintly.
"You do as you"re told!" she returned, in a severe tone. "I"ll hold you--don"t you fear."
She had already looped her end of the rope over the limb of a tree that stood rooted upon the brink of the bluff. With such a purchase she would be able to hold all the rope itself would hold.
"Ready!" she called down to him.
"All right! Here I swing!" was the reply.
Leaning over the brink, rather breathless, it must be confessed, the girl from Sunset Ranch saw him swing out of the top of the tree.
The tree-top was all of seventy feet from its roots. If he slipped now he would suffer a fall that surely would kill him.
But he was able to help himself. Although he crashed once against the side of the bluff and set a bushel of gravel rattling down, in a moment he gained foothold on a ledge. There he stood, wavering until she paid off a little of the line. Then he dropped down to get his breath.
"Are you safe?" she shouted down to him.
"Sure! I can sit here all night."
"You don"t want to, I suppose?" she asked.
"Not so"s you"d notice it. I guess I can get down after a fashion."
"Hurt bad?"
"It"s my foot, mostly--right foot. I believe it"s sprained, or broken.
It"s sort of in the way when I move about."
"Your face looks as if that tree had combed it some," commented Helen.
"Never mind," replied the youth. "Beauty"s only skin deep, at best. And I"m not proud."
She could not see him very well, for the sun had dropped so low that down where he lay the face of the bluff was in shadow.
"Well, what are you going to do? Climb up, or down?"
"I believe getting down would be easier--"specially if you let me use your rope."
"Sure!"
"But then, there"d be my pony. I couldn"t get him with this foot----"
"I"ll catch him. My Rose can run down anything on four legs in these parts," declared the girl, briskly.
"And can you get down here to the foot of this cliff where I"m bound to land?"
"Yes. I know the way in the dark. Got matches?"
"Yes."
"Then you build some kind of a smudge when you reach the bottom. That"ll show me where you are. Now I"m going to drop the rope to you. Look out it doesn"t get tangled."
"All right! Let "er come!"
"I"ll have to leave you if I"m to catch that buckskin before it gets dark, stranger. You"ll get along all right?" she added.
"Surest thing you know!"
She dropped the rope. He gathered it in quickly and then uttered a cheerful shout.
"All clear?" asked Helen.
"Don"t worry about me. I"m all right," he a.s.sured her.
Helen leaped back to her waiting pony. Already the golden light was dying out of the sky. Up here in the foothills the "evening died hard" as the saying is; but the buckskin pony had romped clear across the plateau. He was now, indeed, out of sight.
She whirled Rose about and set off at a gallop after the runaway. It was not until then that she remembered she had no rope. That buckskin would have to be fairly run down. There would be no roping him.
"But if you can"t do it, no other horsie can," she said, aloud, patting the Rose pony on her arching neck. "Go it, girl! Let"s see if we can"t beat any miserable little buckskin that ever came into this country. A strawberry roan forever!"
Her "E-e-e-yow! yow!" awoke the pony to desperate endeavor. She seemed to merely skim the dry gra.s.s of the open plateau, and in ten minutes Helen saw a riderless mount plunging up the side of a _coulee_ far ahead.
"There he goes!" cried the girl. "After him, Rosie! Make your pretty hoofs fly!"
The excitement of the chase roused in Helen that feeling of freedom and confidence that is a part of life on the plains. Those who live much in the open air, and especially in the saddle, seldom think of failure.