CHAPTER XX
HILDA AND THE BLUE ROAN
The first four miles were covered at terrific speed, though three times Creeping Mose stopped with a plunge and declared his intention of fighting it out then and there. But Hilda was aflame. Fear was wiped out. Between the level plain and burning sky, she knew only Creeping Mose and herself—herself with neither flesh nor bones, nor anything but a blind determination to force him to her will.
She clung like a limpet. When the horse bucked most fiercely, she swung the quirt and let him have it with all the strength of her arm. Her black hair was shaken out of its plait and blew behind her, a waving banner; her face was crimson with the heat and exertion. On heaving chest and shoulders the shirt-waist clung, soaked. At every jump sweat flew from the horse and spattered on the dry, hot earth. At last Mose flung himself obliquely into the air in a whirling buck. She set her teeth for what she’d seen the boys do, and brought the head of her quirt down in a thump between his ears. She hated to do that, but it seemed to be what Mose needed; with a snort, he gathered himself; then, as though he decided that what he had on his back was boss of the expedition, stretched out his neck and broke away in a dead run that was a revelation to Hilda of horse speed.
No captive of old Rome ever drove his chariot race down the great hippodrome in a finer ecstasy of rashness than that which thrilled through Hilda as the long levels streamed back beneath those flying hoofs. This wasn’t the Hilda of the cyclone cellar who needed to dress up and make believe for her romance.
Her whole thought had been to rush the thing through and get back to the trail where it cut the road to El Capitan, where she would meet Pearse; but this—this was real daring and adventure. It was the sort of thing any one of the boys would have done, taking it all as a part of the day’s work. She, too, let her whole self go in the action, like one of them, like a soldier on a battlefield. She’d taken Creeping Mose against Uncle Hank’s orders. But she knew the rules of the range: if she made good—and she would—she was all right. At the end of four breathless, flashing miles, the horse was still running strongly.
Four miles and a half; he was coming down to a steady, swinging lope. Five miles; the fierce sun stung her bare head and face, the wind roared in her ears, continuous, browbeating, and her horse was almost at the end of wind and strength.
As the blue roan ceased to fight her, Hilda’s thoughts had a chance to clear a bit, she had breath and attention to admire him. She leaned forward and patted him on the neck—and the sweat fumed up around her hand like suds. A year—Uncle Hank had thought he might be fit for her in a year—and here she was riding him within three days!
What was happening back there on the Three Sorrows? That outfit were rustlers. Uncle Hank thought so, or he’d never have sent her on such an errand as this. She couldn’t get away from the belief that the young fellow with them was Fayte Marchbanks. And the cattle belonged to Fayte’s father. Well—that didn’t make any difference—they were rustlers just the same.
Nobody but a rustler would have been as careless as that man was about the count. People didn’t feel that way about their own cattle. That look in his eye, when he praised her and called her “little lady”—she wasn’t exactly sure where and how it offended her so much, yet she knew that it did offend. Rustler! That’s what he was.
Far off on that open plain the three pines that stood above the spring began to show like tiny weeds. With her breath coming in gasps, scarce able to feel the saddle beneath her or the rein she clutched in her hands, she yet brought her heels sharply against Mose’s dripping sides, and he answered with a spurt. Taller and taller the pines loomed; finally, she could make out beneath them a hooded chuck-wagon, hobbled ponies, and men lying or sitting about.