Bull had turned on him with suppressed fury. But through the din and smoke, into that hell of cries and groans, whistling, crashing shells, there came to him first the old wistful vision of Mary and Betty Mills; then the feel of Lee’s soft, cool arms on his neck. Himself forgotten, the lust of battle suddenly chilled, he shook with fear.
“Come on!”
Turning, he ran down the hill toward the chaparral where they had hidden their horses, half a mile away. Coming in they had faced only the rain of bullets curved over the hill. Now, from the flank, they came fast and low, a heavy cross-fire. Yet while they ran breathlessly through the dust under the merciless blaze of the sun the correspondent cracked his jokes.
“Consolation race! Odds a hundred to one!” he gasped. “Gosh! but that chaparral is going faster the other way!”
A few minutes later he dropped, almost on its edge. Yet even in that dire moment he remained his cheerful self.
“Shot in the leg! I always said that was the only way they’d ever get me. Here’s my notes, Diogenes! Give them to Weekes and tell him to chuck ’em on to the wires. Now, run like hell!”
And Bull did “run like hell”—with the correspondent across his shoulders, into the chaparral where the rain of bullets slacked; faded out by the time he reached the horses. The bullet had gone through the knee. All that he could do was to stop the bleeding with a handkerchief twisted tight above. Then, with the correspondent lying forward in his saddle, arms around his horse’s neck, he headed for the town.
As they rode, in their rear rose a huge, raucous voice, the charging yell of the Carranzistas pouring in a brown flood over the trenches. Followed the terrible roar of a rout—yells, shrieks, curses, victorious shouts, scattering shots, occasional volleys. On the edge of the town it caught and engulfed them, that mad rout. Helpless jetsam, they floated above, a stream of wild, sweating faces, powder-grimed, bloody, flecked with a yeast of glistening, fearful eyes, floated through the painted adobe streets to the railroad yards.
There fugitives were already piling by thousands on top of the trains and increasing the confusion; there came, just then, a flash from the hills they had left. Followed the shriek, rising crescendo of the shell, then—the explosion smoke cleared, showing a splintered mass be-spattered with mangled humanity that had been, a moment before, sentient human beings. The Carranzistas were shelling the station with Valles’s own guns.
“We’re farther up!” the correspondent whispered through white, drawn lips. “We bribed the engineer, last night, to pull us out on the main line to insure our getaway.”