The three fell in behind him without cavil or question. He was in charge of the outfit, and that settled it. Pink, released from irksome inaction by the permission to shoot, turned and fired back at the first Indian his sights rested upon. He saw a spurt of sand ten jumps in advance of his target, and he swore and fired again without waiting to steady his aim. The sorrel pack-horse, loping along fifty yards or so behind with a rhythmic clump-clump of frying-pan against coffee-pot at every leap he took, swerved sharply, shook his head as though a bee had stung him, and came on with a few stiff-legged “crow hops” to register his violent objection to being shot through the ear.
Pink, with an increased respect for the shooting skill of Lite Avery, glanced guiltily at the others to see if they had observed where his second bullet hit. But the others were eyeing Applehead uneasily and paid no attention to Pink or his attempts to hit an Indian on the run. And presently Pink forgot it also while he watched Applehead, who was apparently determined to commit suicide in a violently original form.
“You fellers keep behind, now—-and hold the Injuns back fer a minute er two,” Applehead yelled while he set himself squarely in the saddle, gathered up his reins as though he were about to “top a bronk” and jabbed the spurs with a sudden savageness into Johnny's flanks.
“GIT outa here!” he yelled, and Johnny with an astonished lunge, “got.”
Straight toward the fence they raced, Johnny with his ears laid back tight against his skull and his nose pointed straight out before him, with old Applehead leaning forward and yelling to Johnny with a cracked hoarseness that alone betrayed how far youth was behind him.
They thought at first that he meant to jump the fence, and they knew he could not make it. When they saw that he meant to ride through it, Weary and Pink groaned involuntarily at the certainty of a fall and sickening entanglement in the wires. Only Lite, cool as though he were rounding up milch cows, rode half-turned in the saddle and sent shot after shot back at the line of Navajos, with such swift precision that the Indians swerved and fell back a little, leaving another pony wallowing in the sand and taking with them one fellow who limped until he had climbed up behind one who waited for him.
“Go it, Johnny—dang yore measly hide, go to it! We'll show 'm we ain't so old 'n' tender we cain't turn a trick t'bug their dang eyes out? Bust into it! WE'LL show 'em!—” And Applehead shrilled a raucous range “HOO-EEE-EE!” as Johnny lunged against the taut wires.
It was a long chance he took—a “dang long chance” as Applehead admitted afterward. But, as he had hoped, it happened that Johnny's stride brought him with a forward leap against the wires, so that the full impact of his eleven-hundred pounds plus the momentum of his speed, plus the weight of Applehead and the saddle, hit the wires fair and full. They popped like cut wires on a bale of hay—and it was lucky that they were tight strung so that there was no slack to take some of the force away. It was not luck, but plain shrewdness on Applehead's part, that Johnny came straight on, so that there was no tearing see-saw of the strands as they broke. Two inch-long cuts on his chest and a deeper, longer one on his foreleg was the price Johnny paid, and that was all. The lower wire he never touched, since it was a leap that landed him against the fence. He lurched and recovered himself, and went on at a slower gallop while Applehead beckoned the three to come on.
“I kain't say I'd want to git in the habit uh bustin' fences that way,” he grinned over his shoulder as the three jumped through the gap he had made and forged up to him. “But I calc'late if they's another one Johnny n' me kin make it, mebby.”
“Well, I was brought up in a barbed wire country,” Pink exploded, “but I'll be darned if I ever saw a stunt like that pulled off before!”