TOM had a second and very narrow escape from death that spring, before the nephew from Colorado rode to the shack with a letter from Nellie Mallory in his pocket.
He had missed the Miller badly, and one early morning he roped a green bronc and started out on his rounds. But something stampeded the horse just outside the corral, and he ran. Things would have been all right, but the animal slipped and almost fell, and when he had recovered Tom was hanging head down across the saddle, with the horn caught in the leather belt of his chaps. After that the horse went crazy, and Tom stared death in the face; he could neither free himself nor right himself. At any moment he knew that the frantic animal might drop into a break or plunge over the steep side of a butte.
If he prayed for anything it was probably for death outright, and not to be left with a broken back in that solitary land. But his mind was working clearly, and just in time he began to work at the cinch buckle. When he had loosened it and the saddle fell, he picked himself up and looked about, but there was no horse in sight.
He found it with a broken neck at the foot of a gulch a few yards ahead, and it is typical that his main grievance about the whole matter was that he had to carry his saddle back!
Although it was the middle of March, the late spring of the Northwest was still far away; the earth was like granite, the trees so brittle that they broke at a touch. In his bunk at night he piled on all his blankets and yet shivered, and the heat from his fire melted the snow on the leaking roof, so that during the night small icicles formed, to drip drearily throughout the day.
The long winter had told on him. Outside of his daily routine he was listless and apathetic. He had no books, even
