They pulled up their horses, having returned to the point of their original stand. Judd Armstrong seemed never to have shifted in his seat and the emaciated horses drooped contentedly, unmindful of the sudden tenseness that gripped all those around. The more high-strung horses sensed it and fidgeted nervously. The ample soul still mothered her infant and smiled while her man sat as stolidly as before, gazing somberly out across the blackened waste that stretched out ahead. The troopers had ceased patrolling the line and now sat their horses at half-mile intervals and faced the eager horde they had held in check for so long a time. The hysterical lady cut short a screech of advice to her neighbor four rigs away as the strains of a bugle sounded faintly from afar, penetrating the buzz of conversation and silencing it. A second note, far to the westward, joined the first and in a space of two seconds the clear ringing strains of the bugles pealed the same message along a front of two hundred miles.
There was a sudden tense hush, the troopers sitting rigidly in their saddles. As the last notes died away each soldier fired a single shot, and with a tremendous sullen roar the most spectacular run of all time was off to a running start.
VIII
A slender thoroughbred leaped forward with the shots, his rider crouched low along his neck. Carver had a brief glimpse of hundreds of saddle horses fanning ahead of the main bulk of the stampede. Then his view was cut off by the dense fog of black ashes churned aloft.
“Look!” he exclaimed.
In either direction, as far as the eye could reach this murky cloud was sweeping forward. As it eddied and curled he could catch glimpses of the swaying gray tops of covered wagons and the glittering flash of newly painted runabouts. It seemed that a black cyclone belt a hundred yards in width had sucked up thousands of strange land craft and churned them across the prairies over an endless front.
Men shouted frenzied encouragement to their horses, their voices lifting above the rattle of the laboring vehicles. Not infrequently there sounded a splintering crash as some outfit was piled up in a wreck or the sudden smash and subsequent groaning screech which announced that two rival wagons had collided and locked hubs. A shrill cowboy yelp of exultation rose high above the uproar.
“Now we can break through,” Carver stated, and they urged their horses into a lope and passed the wagons that lagged behind, darting past others as opportunity offered.
The girl saw humanity in the raw, the bars of convention lowered by excitement and each man’s true nature standing forth undisguised. She was treated to kaleidoscopic flashes of human avarice and sublime generosity. A heavy wagon came to grief as its owner lashed his horses over the four-foot bank of a dry wash. The tongue was stabbed into the earth, buckled and snapped, piling the outfit up in a tangled heap in the bottom of the dry gulch. A man in a light rig cheered the accident as he made a safe crossing of the wash at a point some few feet away where the banks were less precipitate, shrieking a derisive farewell to the unfortunates as he passed. A chap-clad rider set his horse back on its haunches and dismounted.
“Crawl him, stranger,” he invited. “Give that pony his head and he’ll take you where you’re aiming for. I’ll help the woman straighten out this tangle.”