THE MYSTERIOUS RIDER



CHAPTER I

A September sun, losing some of its heat if not its brilliance, was
dropping low in the west over the black Colorado range. Purple haze
began to thicken in the timbered notches. Gray foothills, round and
billowy, rolled down from the higher country. They were smooth,
sweeping, with long velvety slopes and isolated patches of aspens that
blazed in autumn gold. Splotches of red vine colored the soft gray of
sage. Old White Slides, a mountain scarred by avalanche, towered with
bleak rocky peak above the valley, sheltering it from the north.

A girl rode along the slope, with gaze on the sweep and range and color
of the mountain fastness that was her home. She followed an old trail
which led to a bluff overlooking an arm of the valley. Once it had been
a familiar lookout for her, but she had not visited the place of late.
It was associated with serious hours of her life. Here seven years
before, when she was twelve, she had made a hard choice to please her
guardian--the old rancher whom she loved and called father, who had
indeed been a father to her. That choice had been to go to school in
Denver. Four years she had lived away from her beloved gray hills and
black mountains. Only once since her return had she climbed to this
height, and that occasion, too, was memorable as an unhappy hour. It
had been three years ago. To-day girlish ordeals and griefs seemed back
in the past: she was a woman at nineteen and face to face with the first
great problem in her life.

The trail came up back of the bluff, through a clump of aspens with
white trunks and yellow fluttering leaves, and led across a level bench
of luxuriant grass and wild flowers to the rocky edge.

She dismounted and threw the bridle. Her mustang, used to being petted,
rubbed his sleek, dark head against her and evidently expected like
demonstration in return, but as none was forthcoming he bent his nose to
the grass and began grazing. The girl's eyes were intent upon some
waving, slender, white-and-blue flowers. They smiled up wanly, like pale
stars, out of the long grass that had a tinge of gold.

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