“Indeed you are not!” she began, in a flush of relief. Then, as a picture of Gordon lying bound on the trail rose to her mind, she turned her head in fear that he might read the sudden impulse to slash the lead rope and go galloping back.
The certain knowledge that she would be overtaken checked the impulse. Also, with a woman’s self-abnegation, she comforted herself with the thought that every mile she traveled lessened his hazard. She rode on till certain whisperings between the revolutionists ahead brought her again under fear that grew and reached its climax when, later in the afternoon, they swung at right angles on to the San Carlos trail and rode, now along the flank of a mountain, again through a wooded valley, thence up and over a great hill, while the sun slid down behind them. While they traveled dusk quenched the flaming peaks. The long shadows drew together, enwrapping hill and valley in a thick veil through which men and horses loomed as dark, sinister shapes. When they stopped, suddenly, where a stream emerged from a wood, she shook with apprehension.
“The beasts are tired, señor, and this is a good place to camp,” a voice came back.
“Oh, don’t! Let us keep on!” she pleaded.
“The animals are tired and must be fed,” Ramon answered. “After they are rested we will go on.”
As, dismounting, he began to untie her feet, she was seized again with a wild impulse to turn and dash away in the dark. But even had it been possible, just then a heap of dried grass and leaves flared up from a match illuminating the woods and stream. Reaching up, Ramon lifted her down and seated her close to the fire.
Sitting there, she watched him unsaddle and hobble their beasts. Her swift, uneasy glances showed the revolutionists doing the same. Yet—all the fears of that long afternoon now concentrated in a cold horror. Intuitively, she knew. When, his hands full of food he had unpacked from his saddle-bags, Ramon came walking past the revolutionists toward her, she broke out with a sudden scream:
“Take care!”
Too late! A pair of sinewy arms locked like brown snakes around him, pinioning his arms to his body. As he went down, fighting madly, Lee leaped up and ran. But already Ilarian and another man had started toward her. Running her swiftest, straining madly with the beat of his pursuing feet, like a drum in her ears, she had gained the edge of the wood, was almost within its safe blackness, when she was seized and pulled back with a wrench that tore the shirt away from one white shoulder and threw her to the ground.
She rose instantly on one knee, then paused at the sight of the brutish face above. One hand clutching the torn shirt at her neck, eyes dark lamps in a face of white horror, she crouched like an animal at bay till, with a sudden snatch, he stooped and lifted her bodily.