CHAPTER V.
JEAN RIDES INTO A SMALL ADVENTURE At the mouth of the coulee, she turned to the left instead of to the right, and so galloped directly away from the Bar Nothing ranch, down the narrow valley known locally as the Flat, and on to the hills that invited her with their untroubled lights and shadows and the deep scars she knew for canyons.
There were no ranches out this way.

The land was too broken and too barren for anything but grazing, so that she felt fairly sure of having her solitude unspoiled by anything human.

Solitude was what she wanted.

Solitude was what she had counted upon having in that little room at the Lazy A; robbed of it there, she rode straight to the hills, where she was most certain of finding it.
And then she came up out of a hollow upon a little ridge and saw three horsemen down in the next coulee.

They were not close enough so that she could distinguish their features, but by the horses they rode, by the swing of their bodies in the saddles, by all those little, indefinable marks by which we recognize acquaintances at a distance, Jean knew them for strangers.