Stanley Mitchell topped the last rise in Morning Gate Pass in the late afternoon.

Cobre Basin spread deep and wide before him, ruddy in the low sun; Cobre town and mines, on his left, loomed dim and misshapen in the long dark shadows of the hills.
Awguan, top horse and foreman of Stanley's mount, swung pitapat down the winding pass at a brisk fox trot.

The gallop, as a road gait, is frowned upon in the cow countries as immature and wasteful of equine energy.
He passed Loder's Folly, high above the trail--gray, windowless, and forlorn; the trail dipped into the cool shadows, twisted through the mazy deeps of Wait-a-Bit Canon, clambered zigzag back to the sunlit slope, and curved round the hillsides to join, in long levels, the wood roads on the northern slopes.
As he turned into the level, Stanley's musings were broken in upon by a sudden prodigious clatter.

Looking up, he became aware of a terror, rolling portentous down the flinty ridge upon him; a whirlwind streak of billowed dust, shod with sparks, tipped by a hurtling color yet unknown to man; and from the whirlwind issued grievous words.
Awguan leaped forward.
Bounding over boulders or from them, flashing through catclaw and ocatillo, the appearance swooped and fell, the blend disjoined and shaped to semblance of a very small red pony bearing a very small blue boy.

The pony's small red head was quite innocent of bridle; the bit was against his red breast, held there by small hands desperate on the reins; the torn headstall flapped rakishly about the red legs.