“Bud!” For an instant she clung to him.
“Lead the horses together and shoot them!” he ordered, although the others could scarcely hear him.
Every instant was priceless now, for dimly at the edge of their vision the front wave of the living, leaping tide could be seen.
Larkin swung the girl’s horse alongside Pinte, and without a thought or a pang shot them both. They fell one on top of the other. Then the 109 stranger in the mask led his animal in front of the two that had fallen and put a bullet through its brain. All now leaped behind this still throbbing barricade.
“Got a gun, Julie?” demanded Bud.
“Yes.”
“Give it to me and load mine from your belt.” They exchanged weapons and the girl with practiced hand slipped the cartridges into their chambers. The unknown had drawn two guns from some place in his equipment, and now the three peered over their shelter.
The advance line of animals was scarcely twenty-five yards away, and, with a clutch of horror at his heart, Bud recognized that they were not cattle as he had supposed, but sheep—his own two thousand.
In the instant that remained he remembered the shots and shouting of a quarter-hour before, and realized that the animals had been stampeded deliberately.
“Let ’er go,” he screamed above the tumult, “and yell like blazes!”