and gradually they drew so close that all three riders were blanketed by the same cloud of dust.
Behind them came a second great cloud, in which rode a score or more of riders from Maguez who had hastily mounted and galloped out to see the fun as soon as they heard there was a runaway.
"The canal!" shouted Jack suddenly.
A wandering breeze for a second swept aside the dust cloud before them, and showed the fresh, raw wound gaping in the level surface of the desert. It was fully thirty feet wide, and as the canal was a new ditch, its sides were almost as steep as a wall.
Bud Wilson said nothing, but set his lips grimly. With an imperceptible movement of his wrist, he gathered his trailing loop into the air and began to whirl it above his head, first slowly and then faster and faster. The rawhide loop opened out till it was ten feet or more in circumference.
"Now!" he yelled, and at the same instant the released loop went swirling through the air.
"Yip-yip!" yelled Jack.
Bud had won proudly many a prize for roping, and was the most expert man with the lariat in his part of the West. Had he wished, he could have roped the flying Petticoats by the heels. But to have done so would have been to have brought the crazed pony down with a crash, and probably have seriously injured, if not killed, her rider.
Swish!
The great loop settled as accurately as if hands had guided it about the maddened pony's neck. Bud took a twist of his end round the saddle horn and checked the calico.
"Got her!" screamed Jack. "Yi-hi!"
But there came a sudden shout of dismay from Bud.
The calico's foot had caught in a gopher hole, and over he went, turning almost a complete somersault.
Jack gave a shout of horror as he saw the catastrophe. He feared Bud had been killed, but the lithe bronco buster was up in a second, stumbling toward his fallen horse.
But the rope did not prove equal to the sudden strain put upon it by the collapse of the calico. The instant the pony had fallen, of course its full weight had come on the rawhide, instead of there being, as Bud had planned, a gradual strangling down of the runaway. It had been, in effect, a tug of war between the flying Petticoats and the suddenly checked calico.
Crack!
The rope twanged taut as a stretched fiddle string and parted with a snap just as Bud reached back into the hip of his leathern chaperaros for his Colt.
He had determined to shoot the runaway and risk disabling Ralph, rather than have the pony take the twenty-foot plunge over the brim of the canal. But at the moment his finger pressed the trigger there came a shout from Jack, who was now only a few paces behind Petticoats. The boy's hastily thrown lariat had missed altogether.
Before their horrified eyes, the runaway buck-skin and her rider the next instant plunged in one confused heap over the bank of the canal and vanished from sight.
Jack was within a breath of following them over the brink, but in the nick of time he wheeled the carefully trained Firewater round on his haunches and averted a second calamity.
Controlling his half-maddened steed, the boy pressed to the edge of the canal. The bank was new and smooth, and as steep as the roof of a house. Ralph and his pony had rolled over and over down this place in one inextricable heap. But by the time Jack reached the edge of the steep bank, Ralph had kicked free of the big, clumsy Mexican stirrups and was struggling in the water.
The flood was rushing along in a yellow, turbid swirl. There had been a freshet in the mountains a few days before, and to relieve the pressure on the land company's dam up there, the spillways had been opened to their capacity. The canal was carrying the great overflow. It tore along between the high, steep banks like a mill race.
"The flood gates!" came a frenzied shout from Bud. He pointed westward.
In a flash Jack realized that the flood gates below must be open, and at the instant of this realization came another thought.
If he did not act and act quickly, Ralph would be carried through the gates to probably certain death.
"Ralph! Ralph!" he shouted, as he gazed down at the brave struggle his chum was making to reach the bank; but the current swept the Eastern boy away from it every time. His pony had gained the bank, and was pawing pitifully at the steep, sandy slope.
It did not need more than a glance to see that Ralph's strength was giving out. He turned up a white, despairing face to Jack, by whose side there now stood Bud Wilson.
"Quick, Jack! Chuck him the rope!" shouted Bud in a tense voice.
Inwardly angry at himself for not having thought of this before, Jack sent his rawhide snaking down the bank. Ralph, his face white and strained above the tearing yellow current, reached out in a desperate effort to clutch the rawhide. Even as his fingers gripped it, however, the current proved too much for him. He was swept away on its white-flecked surface like a bit of drift.
"Ride, boy, ride! We've got to beat him to the sluice and close the gates! It's his only chance!"
It was Bud's voice once more.
Somehow, Jack found himself in the saddle, with Firewater racing under him as that brave little bay had never raced before. Close alongside came Bud, rowelling his bleeding-kneed calico cruelly to keep alongside. Far behind came shouts and yells from the crowd. The buckskin, the cause of all the trouble, managed to clamber to the edge of the stream, where the water was slightly shallower, and was dragged out by ropes. While the race for life swept onward, she stood dripping and shivering on the summit of the bank.
From his flying pony Jack caught occasional glimpses of Ralph in the stream below. The boy was a good swimmer, and now that he was being carried along with the current, instead of fighting it, he was able to keep his head above water most of the time.
"Stick it out, Ralph, old boy!" yelled Jack, as he dashed past the half-drowned lad whom the rapid current was carrying almost as swiftly as the over-run ponies could gallop.
"We'll be in time!" exclaimed Jack, through his clinched teeth. Right ahead of him he saw some grim, gallows-like looking timbers reared up against the sky line, which he knew must mark the sluice.
Hardly had the thought flashed through his mind, when Firewater seemed to glide from beneath him. An instant later Jack found himself rolling over and over on the level plain.
The same accident as had befallen Bud had happened to him. A gopher hole – one of those pests of desert riders – had tripped Firewater and sent his rider sprawling headlong.
"Hurt?"
Bud Wilson, on the calico, drew up alongside Jack, who had struggled to his feet and was looking about in a dazed sort of way.
"No, I'll be all right in a second. But Firewater!"
The bay had risen to his feet, but stood, sweating and trembling, with his head down almost between his knees. He could not have expressed "dead beat" better if he had said it in so many words.
"Blown up!" exclaimed Bud disgustedly.
"What shall we do?" choked out Jack.
"Here, quick! Up behind me!"
Bud
