At that instant she felt a powerful hand close over her mouth. An arm forced her to the ground. She looked up into the face of a man! He was a tall man, a strong man. Suddenly she ceased struggling. She knew what man this was!
But why, as he crouched beside her, holding her down, stifling her voice, did he, too, look with eyes fixed where those of the plunging horse just had been, toward the edge of the thicket?
“Hush!” She heard his voice, though he kept his head up. “Don’t call out! Where is the little trunk? Have you got it?”
She nodded, under his stifling hand, or would have done so.
“You thief!” she tried to say. “Oh, God curse you!” For now she felt her sentence had been just. “Oh, you thief!” she said, or thought she said.
But though again she writhed and tried to call, no sound came save the hard whistling of her nostrils, coveting air.
Then she almost tore free—did tear free. Crouching almost over her, his body above hers, one hand holding her down, suddenly she saw him go to one knee, saw a move of his free arm. Her eardrums were almost shattered by a double explosion just above her head. He had fired at something in the dark.
Came medley of night alarm—horses snorting, men calling. Taisie’s senses could give no sequence to all the varied sounds. She caught the rush of hoofs toward the mesquite, thought that her horse had been stolen; heard a man’s scream in the night, where she supposed the thief had shot one of her own men.
But concurrently she heard another sound, one which terrified every man who also heard it—the rumble and thunder of four thousand cattle, wakened by vague terror.
The sounds of shots in the night were not usual, not understood by them, hence ominous of ill. Jumping to their feet, addled by the slumber in their eyes, their tails high and rolling, their horns rattling, the herd by instinct turned in the direction opposite the sounds of terror. Then, swayed by the one blind instinct left to them, they broke.