But it was too late. With a deep sullen roar like prisoned waters bursting their barriers and pouring into the valley, with a shaking thunder of hoofs that set the solid ground quivering, the mob broke in mad stampede.
They were coming straight for the camp, and every man there knew what it meant if they burst on it before they could mount and gallop clear. There were no orders given and none were needed. Each man simply dropped everything and leaped for his horse, and flung himself to the saddle. Steve had been in the act of rolling in his blanket when the first warning came. He flung the blanket from him and ran with the rest. Ned Gunliffe was just ahead of him, and as he passed Steve’s horse to reach his own beyond it, Steve could have sworn he saw Ned’s wrist jerk his whip forward. In the darkness and rush it was a thing he could never be certain of, but certain it was that his horse leaped suddenly and set off at a canter—the horse that Steve had trained to stand still in any turmoil, till his hand was on its neck. He whistled loud and shrill, and his horse stiffened its forelegs and propped and slid a yard, and stood stock still. Steve ran and caught its mane and called to it, and it sprang forward with a bound as he swung to its back.
Steve was boiling with rage, and swore a bitter oath between clenched teeth to settle with Ned Gunliffe for his trick, but meantime he had other things to think of.
The roar of the oncoming mob was close on his heels; he was stretching at full gallop over sticks and stones he could not see till he was on them; black night stretched in front of him, and the pounding hoofs behind.
“Open out—open out. Get on the flanks an’ haud them together,” roared Scottie. But the men were edging out of the track of the mob already. In the darkness, and over country that was risky enough to gallop over in broad daylight, there were too many chances of taking a fall. And where a fall is merely a fall, with a sporting chance of broken bones at ordinary times, there is no chance about it if the fall is in front of a stampeding mob. If man or horse went down, it would be never to rise again, and the flying feet would cut the flesh from the bones and hammer the bones to splinters, and leave a broken, bloody pulp stamped into the dust behind them. So the men swung out and clung to the flanks, and were satisfied to keep themselves on their saddles and their horses on their feet, and to ply the lashes in biting cuts and cracks.
It was no use trying to hold or stop the stampede yet—that would come later. All they could do was try to turn the head up the long hill that ran on one flank, and keep the leaders from swinging to the other side, where a maze of gullies and precipitous ridges would have caught and killed the biggest half of them.
The herd breasted a spur and topped the crest, and rolled over and down the other side without slackening their pace for a single breath. They edged downhill towards the valley again, in spite of all the men, and a fusillade of whip-cracks, and a hail of stinging cuts could do. They crashed into a strip of wood, smashing the smaller trees and bushes flat as if a cyclone had uprooted them, and the men opened out and stooped their heads, and tore on with them till they leaped clear of the trees again, and then edged in again and strove with whip and shout to turn the leaders uphill.
They succeeded at last, and as the steepness of the rise told and the pace slackened a little, the horsemen shot to the front, and the long whips came into play, slashing, snapping, and cutting. The leaders flinched and shrank back from those terrible thongs, that cut through hair and hide, and the pace slackened perceptibly again. The men fought desperately to hold them before they topped the crest of the hill. If once they were over that and went off again, there would be no holding them till the night was spent, and the whole drove was scattered and broken, and hundreds of them maimed and crippled and smashed, in the gullies and along the foot of the cliffs.
“Swing them, lads—swing them,” screamed Scottie, his voice hoarse and cracked with shouting. “Haud them tae the left—tae the left,” as the head of the column struggled over the top of the rise. And the men swung the cruel punishing lashes, and screamed, and coo-e-ed, and flung their horses bodily on the face of the mob, and beat it back and drove it in on itself, till it curled back and thrust its head deep into its own centre. The rest was easy. All the men had to do was keep turning the flood back and swinging it round in a curve, till gradually the whole mass was walking or trotting in one solid revolving wheel. It still had to be kept solid, and every now and then a spoke of the wheel would thrust out, and the wheel would check. But the men fell on the spoke, and with hand and tongue hammered it back into the wheel, that moved slower and slower, and finally stopped. It still rippled and heaved restlessly, and threatened to sway and break again, but the movement was always caught and smothered in time.
“Lat them open oot a wee,” called Scottie, and the men rode in a wider circle, and let the jambed mass slacken, and loose, and spread itself, and—the stampede was over.