CHAPTER XI.
A STRANGE DIVERSION.
It was the wonderful sagacity of the little mare which intervened at this crisis in the fate of her rider.
She was no more than fairly stretched away on a dead run from the new peril when she shot into an arroya or depression in the prairie.

Such a depression suggests the dry bed of a stream through which the water may not have flowed for years.

It is sometimes a few feet only in width, and again it may be a number of rods.

The rich, alluvial soil often causes a luxuriant growth of grass, cottonwood or bush, which affords the best of grazing and refuge for any one when hard pressed by the enemy.
The arroya into which Queenie plunged had gently sloping sides, and was perhaps fifty feet wide.

The bottom was covered not only with grass, but with the thin undergrowth to which allusion has been made, and which was so frail in character that it offered no impediment to the passage of a running horse.
Sterry's expectation was that his mare would shoot across the depression and up the other bank with the least possible delay; but of her own accord, and without suggestion from him, she turned abruptly to the left and dropped to a walk.
He was astounded, and was on the point of speaking impatiently to her as he jerked the bridle-rein, when the occurrence already referred to took place, and made the action of the animal seem like an inspiration or instinct approaching the height of reason.
At the moment she made the sharp turn to the left, another horseman galloped up the opposite slope and off upon the prairie.