To the primitive brain of the old Texan, who trusted nothing so much as a horse, the uncertain raftage of the previous day had made the carts seem riskier than the back of a swimming horse. For that reason he had decreed that Taisie Lockhart should remain until the very last. His plan now was revealed.
“Miss Taisie,” said he, when at length he had regained the take-off, “you’ve seen us all cross there time and again. It’s perfectly safe for a good swimming horse like yours. I’m a-going to cross you like we done everything else. I’m a-going on ahead my own self, and put Del and Cal above and below you, with ropes to your saddle, so’s to steady you if anything should happen. There ain’t no cows now. Just keep your hands off your bridle; don’t try to guide your horse none at all. You mustn’t look down at the water, for if you do you think you are going downstream, when you ain’t. Just you look on ahead, right at the top of my hat; then you’ll be perfectly safe. Us men ain’t going to let nothing happen to you.”
The girl was pale, but the family courage and the traditions of the border were her own. She got into saddle without a word and spurred the snorting Blancocito directly into the curling waters when Nabours gave the word. It seemed to her to be facing death. She resigned her soul.
But suddenly she felt under her a certain lightness, accompanied with a throbbing vibration—movement, progress. She knew her horse was swimming. On ahead, Jim Nabours sat as though upon the surface of the tawny water, the top of his saddle cantle showing over the streaming tail of his horse, which swam on, steadily and confidently, after the gallant fashion of the Texas strain. She looked right and left. Two other men were advancing also strangely over the water, only the upper portion of their bodies visible. It was like some fantastic dream.
In absolute silence they crossed the swimming channel, saw the face of the sand bar come nearer, as though it were approaching upstream across the swirling flood. Fifty yards, thirty yards, twenty yards—they would be safe! And then came one more jest of the immortal gods! It was an accident made more readily possible by the mistaken attempt of using guide ropes on a swimming horse.
A great tree, uprooted somewhere unknown miles to the westward, came rolling and dipping its snaggled branches. The men saw it perfectly well, and coolly made ready to meet the danger, each man with hand at his reata.
Impossible to predict the freak of the changing current! A bared root of the tree caught at the edge of the bar. The heavy trunk swung down toward Dalhart, who had the upstream side. Nabours was now ahead, on the bar. His back was turned. He was looking curiously at the man they all had seen approaching through the shallow water from the farther bank.
The cool-headed plainsman, Dalhart, gave length to his rope, flipped it to free it of the one menace, an upstanding snag which would not allow the rope to clear. But in some way, no one could tell how, a roll of the menacing leviathan threw the snag a little higher. The drag of the rope in the water did the rest. The rope fouled on the snag. As a consequence, the horse of Taisie was drawn directly in front of the log as it swept downstream. A scream, shouts. In a flash the girl’s pony was trying to get his forelegs over the log. The girl herself, thrown or slipping out of the saddle, was in the water; and all of them, horses, riders, with the giant log, were steadily swept down below the head of the bar.
The sudden disaster concentrated all the world into an immediate surface of eddying, onward water, coffee colored, and the narrow strip of wet sand edging it. The scene was not fifty feet across, so near were the swimmers to the one trace of land. Beyond that limit, for the participants existed no horizon and no use for eye or ear. Nabours had some indefinite, vague sense that the wet noise of a horse’s advance through the shallow back of him was close, now directly at his back; but to turn his head from the tragedy at his hand was not possible as even an instant’s thought; so that when the hurrying horseman appeared at his side, as though dropped from the sky, it seemed quite natural enough.
The quick cast of his own rope fell short from where he sat his horse, with footing on the bar. Those in the water had only their own powers now. There was no conscious plan on Taisie Lockhart’s part, or that of the two swimming men; no one could tell how it all had happened, or what now must happen. But suddenly the girl felt herself caught in the strong grasp of Del Williams, himself dismounted, swimming. He dragged her into the swinging branches—across them. By then Dalhart’s rope was free, and Taisie’s pony, dropping back from its struggle to surmount the log, also was free, as the ponderous tree trunk swept on by. So by renewed freak of fortune, all three of the horses made the edge of the bar before it was too late. By this very fact the lives of those caught in the current were set in more instant danger.