Returning consciousness found Otis Carr lying on a high gravel bar. He started to raise a hand to his eyes; but he had forgotten the handcuffs.

He sat up. He still heard the roar of the flood. As his brain cleared, he saw the brown waters rushing past, less than a yard from his feet. A chocolate fountain spurted high in the air where the rushing waters encountered a submerged rock. The tree—

He looked about for the tree that first had been the means of pinioning him in the path of the flood, and then had been the means of saving his life. Thirty yards upstream he saw a mass of roots jammed between two boulders. An immense splinter was all that remained of the bole. The branches and upper portion of the trunk were nowhere to be seen.

Otis rose slowly to his feet. His right leg was still numb. The sleeves of his coat, above the manacles, were ripped and frayed. Blood trickled in a thin stream from beneath one cuff. His clothing was saturated with the muddy water. Every muscle in his body was stiff and sore. He felt of a good-sized lump above one ear, but noted that there was no abrasion.

Gradually, as he stared at the mass of roots jammed in the boulders, it dawned on him what had happened. The tree—his tree—had collided with the boulders with terrific force. The impact had been so great that the trunk had been shattered. The upper part of the tree had been swept downstream by the current, which had dragged him along the splintered portion of the trunk until it had swept him free. It had carried him, too, downstream, to cast him up on the high gravel bar as if he had been but another fragment of driftwood.

He wondered how far downstream he had been swept by the flood. The time he had been buffeted about by the onrush of waters had seemed interminable. He cast about to get his bearings—and to his surprise, he found he was barely three hundred yards from the spot where he had been manacled to the tree.

Slowly, because of his stiffened limbs and handcuffed wrists, he climbed up the rocks and out of the gorge. He made for the Buffalo Forks road sixty yards away, and started back upstream. Rounding a bend in the road, he beheld Pie-face standing, ears upraised inquiringly, not one hundred feet above the spot where Otis had been swept away with the tree.

Otis swung into the saddle, and immediately Pie-face started down the road at a trot. Unlike the cavalry horse, which is trained to stand after the rider mounts until a touch 

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