Perhaps Hervey long since had given up the chase and turned towards the ranch.

In the meantime, so much alike was all the ground she covered that she seemed to be riding on a treadmill but yet she could not return.
The moon floated higher and higher as the night grew old and at length there was a dim lightening in the east which foretold dawn, but Marianne kept on.

If she lost the mares it would be very much like losing her last claim to the respect of her father.

She could see him, in prospect, shrug his shoulders and roll another cigarette; above all she could see Lew Hervey smile with a suppressed wisdom.

Both of them had, from the first, not only disapproved of the long price of the Coles horses, but of their long legs as well and their "damned high heads." She had kept telling herself fiercely that before long, when the mares were used to mountain ways and trails, she would ride one of them against the pick of Hervey's saddle ponies and at the end of a day he would know how much blood counts in horse flesh! But if that chance were lost to her with the mares themselves--she did not know where she could find the courage to go back and face the people at the ranch.