“You bet he will!” and Ellhorn leaped to the horse’s back behind Tuttle. “Whoo-oo-ee-ee!” Two pairs of spurs dug the horse’s flank and a rein as tight as a steel band held its head so high that bucking was impossible. The horse jumped and danced and stood on its hind legs and snorted defiance and with stiffened legs did its best to hump its back and dismount its unwelcome double burden. It might as well have tried to get rid of its own mane. The riders swayed and bent with its motion as if they were a part of its own bounding body. Tuttle gave the animal its head just enough to allow it to work off its disapproval harmlessly, and for the rest, it did nothing that he did not allow it to do. Finally it recognized the mastery, and, pretending to be dreadfully frightened by a sudden vivid flash of lightning, it started off on a run.
“WITH A WHOOPING YELL, HE DASHED AT THE HEAD OF THE PLUNGING HERD”—p. [82]
“Hold on there, old man!” said Tuttle. “This won’t do with two heavy weights on top of you. You’ve got to pack double, but you’d better go slow about it.”
Calming the horse down to a quick trot, they hurried on in the wake of the stampede. They had lost all sound of the herd, and the trail which the ploughing hoofs had made at the beginning of the storm had been nearly obliterated by the beating rain. Once they thought they caught the sound again and must be off the track. They followed it and found it was the roaring of a high wave coming down an arroyo from a cloudburst farther up in the mountain. Hurrying back, they kept to the general direction the cattle had taken until the trail began to show more plainly in the soaked earth, like a strip of ploughed land across the hills. When they reached the next arroyo, they found it a torrent of roaring water. The greater part of the cloudburst had flowed down this channel, and where Mead and the cattle had to cross merely wet sand and soaked earth, they would have to swim.
“See here, Tom,” said Ellhorn, “two’s too much for this beast in the water. You take care of my belt and gun and I’ll swim across.”
“That’s a mighty swift current, Nick. Don’t you think we-all can make it together?”
“I don’t want to take any chances. Buck can get across with you all right, but if he’s got us both on him he might go down and then we’d have to follow Emerson on foot. We’re coverin’ ground almighty slow, anyway. I’m the best swimmer, and you-all can take care of my boots and gun.”
They waited a few moments for a flash of lightning to show them the banks of the arroyo. By its light they saw a water course thirty feet wide and probably ten feet deep, bank-full of a muddy, foaming flood, in which waves two feet high roared after one another, carrying clumps of bushes, stalks of cactus, bones, and other debris. As they plunged into the torrent, Ellhorn seized the tail of Tuttle’s horse, and, holding it with one hand and swimming with the other, made good progress. But in mid-stream a big clump of mesquite struck him in the side, stunning him for an instant, and he let go his hold upon the pony’s tail. A high wave roared down upon him the next moment, and carried him his length and more down stream. He fought with all his strength against the swift current, but, faint and stunned, could barely hold his own. He shouted to Tuttle, who was just landing, and Tom threw the end of his lariat far out into the middle of the stream. Ellhorn felt the rope across his body, grasped it and called to Tuttle to pull.
“Tommy,” he said, when safe on land, “I hope we’ll find the whole Fillmore outfit just a-walkin’ all over Emerson. I don’t want more’n half an excuse to get even with ’em for this trip. Sure and I wish I had ’em all here right now! I’m just in the humor to make sieves of ’em!”