Slim responded promptly this time. Hilda turned again to look where Creeping Mose stood motionless, his feet braced wide, his head hanging, the streaming sweat drying on his blue-gray coat in rough cakes. She got to her feet and stumbled over to him. She laid a hand on his neck—there was no snorting and tossing up of his head now. Creeping Mose never even flinched—he had all he could do to just stand on those four wide-braced feet. Hilda choked a little.
“I feel the same way myself, Mose,” she muttered, a bit thickly, in his drooping ear. “I ache all over, too. If I licked you, you certainly hammered me. I wouldn’t have done it—if I hadn’t just had to.”
“He’ll be all right in the morning, ma’am,” Slim assured her. “Tarpy’ll take good care of him, and they’ll lead him in with the outfit when it follers us. Here’s the sorrel for you.”
Hilda crawled wincingly into the saddle, with his help. At first every movement of the easy-gaited creature she rode was pain to her, and Slim watched anxiously. But soon she swung into the motion and her bruised, wearied body was forgotten in that fierce eagerness to “get there.” Slim, on a wiry, glass-eyed mustang, set the pace, and a stiff one it grew to be. There were scarcely two dozen words spoken as they put the miles behind them; both leaned forward eagerly in their saddles, Slim’s eyes always straight ahead, Hilda’s continually sweeping the levels about them. Long before they covered the distance, they saw a vast cloud of dust hanging on the horizon.
“Stand it any faster?” Slim inquired.
Hilda nodded, and they spurred up. The big dust cloud grew bigger and more palpable.
“Looks like they’s a-havin’ a kind of a time,” commented Slim. “We mebbe could get a finger in the pie yet, if we shove ahead.” The glass-eyed mustang shot forward, Hilda and the sorrel hanging close at its quarter.
“Oh, look!” said Hilda. A flurry of dust approached them, out of which emerged several head of Flying M cattle, running staggeringly. Two or three showed long, bloody scratches on head and breast or shoulders.
“Bust through the bob-wire!” Slim rose in his stirrups and swung his quirt, whooping shrilly. He and Hilda, between them, turned the animals and headed them back. Presently they met two more small bunches, which they turned in like manner and took with them. When they got within sight of the pasture where the Flying M stock had been worked that morning, they saw that the herd was in a pretty well-established mill, the main bulk of the cattle sweeping in a great, brown, living, sweating circle. An occasional Three S man, or one of the Flying M hands, came galloping around on the edge of the surge. As Slim and Hilda rode gingerly across the prostrate fence, they heard a shot fired off to the right, toward the Ojo Bravo trail; another, then three in quick succession. Slim stopped like a pointer dog and threw his nose up, sighting in that direction.
“Well, the colonel got there in time, that’s sure,” was his comment.