With Hoops of Steel

by Florence Finch Kelly

The prostrate Mexican struggled and rolled about, but he could not rise. Marguerite ran to the child and with her ear to his breast she called to Mead.

“His heart is beating! He is still alive!”

Mead caught Antone’s horse, and with Marguerite behind him and the child on one arm started off on the gallop. A long, straggling line of searchers stretched across the mesa, the nearest at least four miles away. As Mead came nearer he dropped the bridle on the horse’s neck and waved his hat and shouted again and again. At last he attracted the attention of the nearest ones, and two or three came running toward him. “Water! Water!” he called, at the top of his voice. They understood, and one ran back to the nearest horseman, who galloped off to a group of people still farther away.

Almost instantly the great throng, like a huge organism, animated by one thought, started off across the mesa toward the galloping horse, every atom in it moved by the single purpose to reach at once the new-found babe. Two horses in front of the hastening multitude ran at their topmost speed and distanced all the others. One carried Pierre Delarue and the other Doctor Long, and behind them came horsemen, carts, carriages and people on foot, all rushing to the one point.

The physician administered such restoratives as he had with him and brought the boy back to consciousness. Then, in the shade of a canopy phaeton, he carried the child home in his arms, while Marguerite and her father and Emerson Mead followed in another carriage, and all the crowd came pouring along after them.

But there were four men who stayed behind. Joe Davis and John Daniels and two others, all in perfect accord and friendliness, went back to find Antone Colorow. They had listened to Mead’s hastily told story of how Antone had attacked and delayed him. Daniels and Davis had looked at each other with a single significant glance and the one remark, “We’d better attend to him!” And then they had taken the other two men and started back.

They found Antone Colorow still struggling, rolling and kicking on the ground. His lips were stained with the blood his own teeth had drawn, and his red beard was flecked with foam. They untied him, and he sprang to his feet and would have darted away, intent on his one purpose to kill the enemy who had escaped his vengeance, had not quick hands seized him. They tied his arms behind him and set him astride his own horse, and then, surrounding him, with their revolvers drawn, they rode away to the southwest, leaving Las Plumas far to their right. On to the river bottom they went, and into a bosque where the cottonwoods and the sycamores grew thickly and the willow underbrush was dense.

Long afterward a river ranchman, hunting a lost cow, penetrated the bosque and started back in sudden fright from a dangling, decaying body that hung from a sycamore limb.

Pierre Delarue insisted that Emerson Mead should come into his house for some wine and wait until they should know the worst or the best concerning little Paul. He sat alone in the room where first he had seen Marguerite, his anxiety about the child driven quite out of his mind by the thought that the long hours alone with her, out on the hills, their hearts and minds united in a common purpose, had come to an end, that she was soon to be another man’s wife, and that he would never see her again. After a time the door opened and she came toward him, smiling gladly. The color had come back to her cheeks and her eyes were bright, though there were still dark rings around them, and her face told of the weariness her brain had not yet recognized. So absorbed had she been in giving the physician assistance and carrying out his directions that she had not thought of her appearance. Her white dress, which yesterday had been fresh and dainty, was in tatters and bedraggled strings, and her hair hung down her back in a disheveled mass. But she came shining down upon Mead’s dark thoughts, fresh and beautiful and glorious beyond compare. He did not remember rising, but presently he knew that he was on his feet and that she was standing in front of him. He did not even hear her say, “Doctor Long says my little Bye-Bye will live and that there will probably be no serious results.”