For one moment after the darkness had enveloped him he fancied he heard a step behind him—a shambling, stumbling step—and the snuffling snort of a frightened horse. He paused in the narrow corridor, and looked back, but the tortuous turnings of the passage obscured the entrance, and the light that it admitted was feeble and far behind. He heard his own breath in a quickly drawn susurrus; it echoed sibilantly. He might have counted the throbs of his heart. It was a chilly place, but the surge of excitement warmed his blood, and with another turn he had burst forth from the narrow passage.
For all his expectancy, his preparation for the emergency, he was dazed for a moment as he stood in the open space facing the great western sky. The breadth of this impression left scant room for detail—a charring fire, where only an ember glowed; a recumbent, somnolent figure wrapped in a blanket beside it; two men playing cards on a saddle; a horse's head looking out from a shadowy niche; and a cry of rage as a man who was grooming the creature turned, with the curry-comb in his hand. The sound was like a bugle call to rouse the others. It rang through Guthrie's senses with a menacing clamor. Here was matter far more significant than cattle-stealing; he had tracked home some terrible deed, he knew by the unguarded anger of the startled tones. His logic, such as he had, made itself felt in deeds. Long before the slow processes of his brain had consciously evolved the idea of danger, he had drawn his pistols, and stood, his back against the wall, a weapon in either hand.
It was an attitude that commended a temporizing policy and invited parley. Taken off their guard, the party made an ineffectual effort to secure their arms. The man beside the horse had indeed grasped a rifle that leaned against the wall, but it was an old-fashioned weapon, whose single discharge would exhaust its offensive and defensive capacities, leaving him at a pitiable disadvantage against the six-shooters which the intruder held, and therefore he forbore even to sight it. One of the card-players had struggled up on his knee, his hand behind him grasping his revolver in his pistol pocket. In view of the bead drawn upon him, he did not dare to pull it; he moved not a muscle. The other held nothing more deadly than a "bobtailed flush," which a moment ago he had regarded as the extremest spite of fate. There was something ludicrous in his petrified attitude, as he sat mechanically holding his cards before him, his mind apparently indissolubly associated with the game, his eyes fixed upon Guthrie as if he had been some amazing combination—a "show of hands" altogether uncalled for and beyond all limits of expectation. To none of them was the moment charged with such signal force as to Steve Yates, rising from his affected slumber, for it was only by feigning thus among his merry comrades that he could be alone with his own thoughts. He turned his face, full of astonished anxiety, upon Guthrie, and then he turned it away, suffused with shame, anticipating accusation. It came upon the instant.
"IT WAS AN ATTITUDE THAT COMMENDED A TEMPORIZING POLICY."
"Hyar ye air, Steve Yates! This is whar ye hev disappeared to, hey? I'd do yer wife an' Mose a favior ef I war ter fill up yer carcass with lead. An' ef I hed it ter spare, I'd do it."
Guthrie looked about, expectant of the signs of some illegal occupation—not moonshining, for his judgment and conscience could approve of this defiance of the law, as well as his heart bear it sympathy, but something that outraged the popular sense of right. There was naught, unless those fine-limbed shadowy equine figures might suggest it.
"Hoss-thievin', hey? An' hed ter steal my cattle ter feed ye on beef whilst hid out?"