"Back up!" he exclaimed. "Back up!"
"Jim!" she cried, "please don't throw me!"
"Don't speak—back!!" he said low and sharply. Something in the tone and manner of the command admitted of no parley.
With her horse cavorting, half strangled, as he was jerked and backed, Kate, looking amazed at Laramie, saw in his face a man new to her—a man she never had seen before. Not her questioning look, nor the frantic struggles of the rearing horses touched him; nothing in the confusion of the sudden moment drew his eye for an instant from the bridge before him and his drawn revolver was already poised in his hand. Kate knew her part without another protest. She tore her horse's mouth cruelly with the curb. Where the danger was, or what, she did not know, but she could obey orders. Her eyes tried to follow Laramie's, bent ahead. The bottoms spread level in every direction. The approach to the little bridge and beyond was as open as the day. Not a living creature was anywhere in sight, nothing with life had anywhere stirred, nothing of sound broke the silence of the morning, except—when Laramie allowed them to stop—the startled breathing of the horses.
"Jim!" exclaimed Kate in awed restraint. "What is it?"
His eyes were riveted straight ahead, but he answered in a most matter-of-fact tone: "There's somebody under that bridge."
She strained her eyes to see something he must have seen that she could not see. The dazzling sunshine, the dusty road, the rough-built, short wooden bridge before them, were all plain enough. And Kate realized for the first time that Laramie, who had been riding on her right was now on her left and presently that his revolver was sheathed and his rifle, which had hung in its scabbard at the horse's shoulder, was slung across the hollow of his right arm.
"Kate," he said, speaking without looking at her, "will you ride back about a mile and wait for me?"
She turned to him: "What are you going to do, Jim?"
"Smoke that fellow out."