The hunters went on, and the gate was immediately closed after them.
The wood rangers had scarce entered the prairie, ere the hurricane, which had threatened since sunset, broke out furiously. A brilliant flash of lightning crossed the sky, followed almost instantaneously by a startling clap of thunder. The trees bowed beneath the fury of the blast, and the rain began falling in torrents. The adventurers advanced with extreme difficulty, amid the chaos of the infuriated elements; their horses, startled by the howling of the tempest, reared and shied at every step. The darkness had become so dense, that, although walking side by side, the two men could scarce see each other. The trees, twisted by the omnipotent blast, uttered almost human cries, answered by the mournful howling of the terrified wild beasts, while the stream, swollen by the rain, rose into waves, whose foaming crests broke with a crash against the sandy banks.
Brighteye and Marksman, case-hardened against the desert temporales, shook their heads contemptuously at every effort of the gust, which passed over them like an ardent simoom, and continued to advance, searching with the eye the gloom that enveloped them like a heavy shroud, and listening to the noises which the echoes bandied about.
In this way they reached the ford of the Rubio, without exchanging a syllable. Then they stopped, as if by mutual agreement.
The Rubio, a lost and unknown affluent of the Great Rio Colorado del Norte, into which it falls after a winding course of hardly twenty leagues, is in ordinary times a narrow stream, on which Indian canoes have a difficulty in floating, and which horses can ford almost anywhere, with the water scarce up to their girths; but at this hour the placid stream had suddenly become a mad and impetuous torrent, noisily rolling along, in its deep and muddy waters, uprooted trees, and even masses of rock.
To dream of crossing the Rubio at this moment would have been signal folly; a man so rash as to attempt the enterprise, would have been carried off in a few seconds by its furious waves, whose yellow surface grew wider every moment.
The hunters remained for a moment motionless beneath the torrents of rain that inundated them, regarding with thoughtful eye the water that still rose and rose, and holding in with great difficulty their startled horses, which reared with hoarse snorts of fear.
These men, with their hearts of bronze, stood stoically amid the frightful uproar of the unchained elements, not seeming to notice the awful tempest that howled around them, and as calm and easy minded as if they were comfortably seated in some snug cave, near a merry fire of twigs. They had only one idea, that of assisting the man whom they suspected of running a terrible danger at this moment.
Suddenly they started, and quickly raised their heads, while looking fixedly and eagerly in front of them. But the darkness was too thick; they could distinguish nothing.
In the midst of the thousand sounds of the tempest, a cry had struck their ear. This cry was a last appeal, a harsh and prolonged cry of agony, such as the strong man conquered by fatality utters, when he is forced to confess his impotence, when everything fails him at once, and he has no other resource than Heaven. The two men leaned forward quickly, and placing their hands to their mouth funnel wise, uttered in their turn a shrill and lengthened cry.