“Only that I will have to father the hull of the business, for they know the Frenchman and I always hunt in couples. But no matter; the bullet ain’t run yet that will put a stop to my breath. Now, stranger, since your yaller-boys and stock is safe, we must put the long miles behind us if we’d save the gal.”
With the words still ringing upon the air, he dashed forward on his errand of mercy—perchance of doom! Forward as a protecting Providence, and it might be as an avenging Fate! Forward, as a lover seeking his mistress, and yet the trail might end in blood!
The checked and restrained pace of the city steed was but as a snail’s progress to the whirlwind of their speed. Proudly their crests were tossed aloft and their heads stretched out as they flung their sinewy limbs in the long gallop that appeared to laugh at space and scorn time. Joyous was the music of ringing snaffle and spur, sweet the lyric of their clattering feet to a horseman’s ear, and wild, almost, as if “desert-born” their career, as they dashed on, snorting the hot breath from their scarlet nostrils and flinging the foam from the champing mouth. It was a race such as pelted thorough-breds may never know of, and the pampered, stall-fed beast would fail in, before a half-score miles were accomplished. Deeply the gopher and the prairie-dog had mined the earth beneath—the wolfs hole was yawning under their feet, and the long grass, trailed and curled, tangling around them; but determination had grasped the rein and a heart of fire led the van.
“Halt!”
The quick and ever-watchful eye of Waltermyer saw that the horses of his followers were unequal to the task, and, checking his own, he allowed them to move more slowly up a slight rise—a green billow as it were, in that emerald sea, crested with flowers, and looking more like the rolling swell of mid-ocean, when the night-tempest has passed and the morning sun has touched the topmost wave with light and fretted it with fleecy gold.
“We can never stand this pace—it will be death to the horses, if not the men,” exclaimed Miles Morse, as he gazed at the heaving flanks and sobbing nostrils—the sinking fire of the eye and the trembling limbs. “The horses can not endure it, and unless we proceed more slowly we shall soon be compelled to go on foot.”
“It’s a pity, stranger, to be mean to dumb beasts. I always go agin it; but when there is life, human life, and that, too, a woman’s, dependin’ on’t, it ain’t no use to talk about horseflesh. It’s twenty good miles to the timber yet, and if we don’t manage to reach it, every hoof will die of thirst.”
“And yet our only chance of life is in riding more slowly.”
“And her’s in bein’ swift and persevering as the black wolf of the mountains, that can outrun the buffalo and tire the antelope.”
But one thought had possession of Waltermyer. His vivid though unrefined fancy had exalted Esther Morse into a paragon, and, like Juliet, he wished but to annihilate space and time, until he rescued her from danger. In action—fierce, rapid and daring action, such souls alone find rest; and once enlisted, nothing can swerve them from what becomes, in their generous imagination, a sacred duty.