“There’s only one track,” said Frances, her breath so feeble, her heart laboring so weakly that she believed that she must die.
Alvino came up, and took the lead in tracking, with the aptness for that trick that goes with primitive minds such as his. Even in the farthest glimmer of the light he could pick up the trail, and soon he led them to the willows where the ravisher’s horse had been concealed.
“One shoe was lost,” said he, pointing, “left one, hind foot.”
Mrs. Chadron stood looking in the direction that the rider had gone with his precious burden, her eyes straining into the dark.
“Oh, if I’d ’a’ come down here place of saddlin’ that horse!” she lamented, with a pang for her lost opportunity.
“He’d have been gone, even then—I was past here and didn’t hear him,” Frances said.
Still the vision persisted in her disturbed imagination 166 of that other night, of one leaning low in the saddle, his fleet horse stretching its neck in desperation for the distant refuge; the dash of pursuing hoofs; the sound of shots up the river; the prayer that she sent to heaven in his behalf.
“Well, it was somebody that knowed the lay of the land,” Mrs. Chadron was repeating, with accusing conviction.
They returned to the house, having done all that they could do. It was doubtful whether the dumb, plethoric nature of Mrs. Chadron made her capable of suffering as Frances suffered, even with her greater reason for pain of that cruel bereavement. Imaginative, refined, sensitive as a harp, Frances reflected every wild wrench of horror that Nola herself must have been suffering as the horseman bore her along in the thick night. She felt that she must scream, but that some frightful thing smothered the voice that struggled in her throat; that she must leap and flee away, but a cloying power was heavy on her limbs, binding her as if her feet were set in lava.
Somebody that knew the “lay of the land.” Great God! could he fight that way, was it in Alan Macdonald to make a hawk’s dash like that? It was hard to admit the thought, to give standing to the doubtful accusation. But those whom they called “rustlers” must have borne Nola away. Beyond the homesteaders up the river were the mountains and the wild country where no man made his home; except them and the cattlemen and the cowboys attending the 167 herds, that country was unpeopled. There was nobody to whom the deed could be charged but the enemies that Chadron had made in his persecution of the homesteaders.