His search was thorough and, being a keen-eyed young man, he discovered the place where Lorraine had crouched down by a rock.

She must have stayed there all night, for the scuffed soil was dry where her body had rested, and her purse, caught in the juniper bush close by, was sodden with rain.
"The poor little kid!" he muttered, and with, a sudden impulse he turned and looked toward the rock behind which the horse had stood.

Help had been that close, and she had not known it, unless---- "If anything happened there last night, she could have seen it from here," he decided, and immediately put the thought away from him.
"But nothing happened," he added, "unless maybe she saw him ride out and go on down the road.

She was out of her head and just imagined things." He slipped the soaked purse into his coat pocket, remounted and rode on slowly, looking for the grip and half-believing she had not been carrying one, but had dreamed it just as she had dreamed that a man had been shot.
He rode past the bag without seeing it, for Lorraine had thrust it far back under a stocky bush whose scraggly branches nearly touched the ground.

So he came at last to the creek, swollen with the night's storm so that it was swift and dangerous.