“We’ll take a cut acrosst here, and maybe head ’em off,” he said, dashing away through the stirrup-high 251 sage, striking close to the hills again, and into rougher going.
The ache of the most intense anxiety that she ever had borne was upon Frances; hope was only a shred in her hand. She believed now that all her desperate riding must come to nothing in the end.
She never had been that long in the saddle before in her life. Her body was numb with cold and fatigue; she felt the motion of her horse, heard its pounding feet in regular beat as it held to its long, swinging gallop, but with the detached sense of being no party to it. All that was sharp in her was the pain of her lost struggle. For she expected every moment to hear firing, and to come upon confusion and death at the next lift of the hill.
In their short cut across the country they had mounted the top of a long, slender ridge, which reached down into the valley like a finger. Now her guide pulled up his horse so suddenly that it slid forward on stiff legs, its hoofs plowing the loose shale.
“You’d better go back—there’s goin’ to be a fight!” he said, a look of shocked concern in his big wild eyes.
“Do you see them? Where—”
“There they are!”—he clutched her arm, leaning and pointing—“and there’s a bunch of fellers comin’ to meet ’em that they don’t see! I tell you there’s goin’ to be a fight!”