“Wait, my dear amigos los Carranzistas! Wait!”
The guns just then topped the hill, and, sitting the great black horse with reckless hardihood out in the open, indifferent to the whistling bullets, he directed their emplacement. “To the left, hombres! a little more! To the right! easy! not quite so much!” The last one set, he rasped out a last command: “Bueno! Now shoot into the dust!” Then followed by his staff he went galloping down the hill.
“He bears a charmed life!” The man next Bull spoke again. “Out of a hundred battles he has come with never a hurt.” He added, with a wink, “An’ it was not always from his front the bullets came.”
Bull had looked on, brows bent in a heavy glower. Now the coal eyes lit with a sudden inspiration. The man had turned again to his shooting. The artillerymen were laying their guns. They fired just as Bull threw up his rifle and drew a bead on the black horse and rider. Sweeping back, the smoke blotted all out. As it cleared, and his eye dropped again to the sights, the correspondent struck up the muzzle.
“What are you trying to do?”
“Justice on that grinning devil.”
“Good job no one saw you.” A quick glance around showed the artillerymen and revolutionists absorbed in their own work “Do you know what they would have done to both of us—skinned us alive, boiled us in oil, or something equally nice. Have a heart! If you don’t care yourself, just think what nice reading it would make for my San Francisco girl, ‘Having toasted him on one side, they then proceeded to fry the other.’”
“I hadn’t thought of that. But if I’d been alone—”
He sent a black flash after the receding figure, then turned again to his loophole.
On his part the correspondent watched till Valles disappeared in the massed cavalry below. Shortly thereafter it began to move, a huge, brown blanket embroidered with the flashing gold and silver of guns and sabers, machetes, accoutrements. For a while it was in full view. Then the impalpable desert dust enveloped it in rolling clouds from which, like the roar of distant surf, issued the thunder of pounding hoofs. Like the rolling, twisting funnel of a cyclone, it swept toward that other distant cloud, and when they met and merged the greater cloud rolled backward, slowly at first, then with increasing speed.