Very cautiously he started down, for the going was decidedly bad and he had no wish to risk a fall. He trailed the prints, marveling at the sure-footedness of the animal which can follow so hazardous a path.
“I wouldn’t dare put a horse down a trail like this,” he mused with a grin, “and yet the rascals will go down by themselves as smooth as silk. Hullo, I guessed right! There is water down here. There’s old Jasper filling up on it, and the mare, too. Well, I guess we don’t walk home this trip.” And just as Polly, some hundreds of feet above him was trying madly to reach the cave, Scott, quite oblivious of impending danger, started on his difficult climb, leading the two horses.
“Serve you darn well right, you fellows, if I was to make you haul me,” he said, as Jasper’s soft nose rubbed against his shoulder. “I would, too, if I didn’t think you’d slide down and break my neck just when my girl needs me. Come on, you grafters, shake a leg, will you?”
It was a bad climb. The perspiration rolled off Scott’s face and the veins stood out upon his forehead. Gasping for breath, he dug his toes into the soft earth and plugged ahead, pulling the reluctant animals after him. He had nearly gained the top, was within twenty feet, perhaps, of the end of the climb, when Jasper began to pull back. They were breaking through some brush, Scott being nearly through when Jasper began pulling. Scott gave the bridle an irritated jerk and spoke sharply to the horse. As he did so, he looked up and saw Angel Gonzales and his band coming down the trail. For a second, Scott lost his wits. He took a quick step forward, giving the bridle another jerk as he did so. Jasper, naturally aggrieved, pulled back again, and Scott, standing on a loose bit of rock, slipped, tried to right himself, slipped again, overbalanced, fell and rolled down—over boulders, through brush, falling ever faster as he tried to regain a foothold.
Both bridles had been wrenched from his hand as he fell and the horses, half scared, half inquisitive, followed him a few steps and then returned to the munching of grass, behind the clump of brush.
Angel Gonzales, a large, brutal-looking man, his face covered with a black beard, his clothes bearing the mark of many a scuffle, swung down the trail in the lead, his particular crony, one Porfirio Cortes, riding immediately after him. A little distance intervened between Cortes and the other members of the party. Even in bandit circles the line is drawn somewhere, and in Angel’s band it was drawn immediately after Porfirio Cortes.
Angel rode, one leg thrown over his pommel, which enabled him to chat comfortably with Cortes. They were talking of Juan Pachuca.
“A slippery one, that,” Cortes had remarked, keenly. “I don’t believe he means to throw in his lot with us. When I see him do it, I will believe—not before.”
“Why not? I have more men than he has. He needs men. All he has is this understanding that he brags of with the new government.”
“Lies, amigo, lies! His record with Carranza is against him.”