"Come a-runnin'!" shouted Johnny over his shoulder, wheeling his horse. He spoke to the black thoroughbred and she struck into a gait she could hold for hours, and one which was deceptive in its smoothness. As he rocked down the trail three Double X punchers rode in from the south.
"Keep a-goin'!" Dave yelled to them, apoplectic with his emotions. "Foller him! Big Tom's run off with th' Arnold gal!"
Slim's brief remark is better left unrecorded. Three sets of hoofs rolled out of the town and sent the dust swirling high along the trail. The punchers overtook and passed Arnold, who cursed the slowness of his mount, shouted profane reassurance at him and left him their dust. Dailey led Fanning around the corner of the saloon and aroused surprised resentment in his horse, which heretofore had regarded him as a sane being. Fanning's gray felt a touch of its youthful spirits return; if it had to race, all right; it wasn't much for speed, but it expected to be better than last at the finish.
Big Tom, having passed the boundaries of the ranch, pulled up long enough to remove the gag. "If you behave yoreself I'll untie you," he said. "You can't get away—if you try it you'll learn what a rope feels like."
Margaret managed to nod and the rope came off of her.
"'Twon't do no good to yell," he told her, "nor to hold back. You won't be missed till supper time, an' then nobody will do much worryin' till dark. They'll search th' range first—an' by th' time they finish that we'll be so far away that they'll never find us. Yo're thinkin' they'll trail us? Huh! Let 'em, then. Once we get into my country they can trail an' be d—d! You might as well make th' best of it. I got th' herd money in my pockets, an' we can have a nice little ranch an' live like th' story books say—happy ever after. Yo're goin' to live there with me. If yo're sensible you can do it as my wife. I'm going to give you that chance. But, yo're goin' to live there with me, just the same."
"You are even more of a beast than I thought," she retorted. "You'll never reach that ranch; and if you do, I'll kill you while you sleep."
"I'm chancin' th' last," he retorted. "Yo're thinkin' of that Nelson, huh?" he grinned. "When Big Tom does play his cards it takes more'n a fool like him to win th' pot. An' I'm sayin' I stacked this deck. I've been stackin' it for a long time, figgerin' everythin'. He's cold-decked, Ma'am; beat clean when he'd reckoned he'd won. Thinkin' they'll trail us, an' get us because we're not pushin' hard?" He laughed ironically. "Didn't I say I've been plannin' this a long time? There ain't no use of wearin' horses out when it ain't needed. With twenty hours, or more, start, ours will be fresh when we need speed—which we won't. You'd do better to begin practicin' callin' yoreself Missus Huff—it'll come easy before you know it. I'm givin' you that chance, an' I'll not bother you till a parson is handy. Then it will be yore move. You've got three days." Receiving no reply he looked around the range and thenceforth ignored her.
A black thoroughbred swept across the little SV valley, passed the corral, and rocked westward along a plain trail. The rider, his sombrero jammed tightly down on his head to baffle the pull of the whistling wind, cold with a rage which had turned him into the personification of vengeance, felt an exultant thrill as the double trail sped past him, for his quarry had but eighteen miles start, and he felt sure that it had been cut down by the speed at which half of it had been covered. There was nothing on hoofs on all that range that could keep an even lead against Pepper. She flashed past mesquite, around chaparrals, her great heart beating with a gameness which excelled even her love for the race; her trim legs swinging rhythmically, the reaching of her free, beautiful stride eating up the range and sending it past like the speeding surface of some great rapids. A Gila monster moved from her course barely in time, and a rattler coiled and struck too late. Off in the brush a startled coyote changed its mind about crossing the open and slunk back into cover, following the black with suspicious gaze. The great muscles writhed and bunched, rippled and bulged under the satiny skin, the barrel-like chest rising and falling with a rhythm and smoothness which graphically told that it was a perfect part of a perfect running machine. Down the slopes at top speed, up them at a lope, the undulating range slipped swiftly past. Brush and scattered mesquite, chaparrals and lone, sentinel cacti; hollows, coulees, draws, and arroyos went behind in swift procession. Still the double trail lay ahead, now lost as it crossed hard ground, now plain with small, shallow basins where the sand had slid back and hidden the outlines of the roofs, and then clear and sharp and fresh in soils possessing claylike cohesion.