There followed half an hour of confusion at the corrals while mounts were being roped. Yells, wild laughter, vile oaths, rose like a fetid vapor out of the Bowl, fouling the clear sunlight, sweet warm air. Then the massed animals began to move from the corrals and thin out to single file at the foot of the trail. Just as Bull had foreseen, a raider sandwiched in at intervals to keep them moving. As before, the watchers looked down upon the thin file wriggling like a slow, black snake up and around the trail’s yellow convolutions.
After an interminable time, it seemed to them, the head of the file rose to Jake’s post. Lying there, his long, thin body stretched at length in the sage, narrowed eyes fixed on the first raider, Jake had never looked more like “The Python” he appeared in peon eyes. And he had the serpent’s patience. Though his finger played impatiently with his rifle trigger, he watched man after man go by, waiting, waiting, for Bull’s shot above. Always cool, he did not give vent, like Sliver, to inward grumblings as the file rose to him.
“If ’twasn’t for orders,” he mentally harangued the first raider that passed, “your black soul ’u’d be a-busting now on its way to hell!”
High above, Gordon waited with equal impatience, his hazel eyes transmuted once more into blue steel flecked with hot, brown lights. But his imagination revealed to him much that was hidden from the prosaic vision of the cowman. The clear, clean air that flowed like tawny wine across the Bowl; dry whisper of the wind in the sage at his side; drift of white cloud across the blue above; the hum of busy insects; slow winding upward of the herd; it was all pastoral; stirred in his mind a vagrant recollection of the peace and quiet of Gray’s “Elegy.” In place of the thunders and lightnings, murky night, black rains with which man’s imaginings clothed, tragedy, nature had set the stage in sunlight and flowers; invested it with Sabbath calm. Yet, the more powerfully for that peaceful contrast, he felt—felt with savage joy—Death, the grim angel, hovering above.
With her girl’s strong intuition, Lee shared his feeling. Just as the wriggling black line rose up to Bull’s station she leaned forward and broke off a twig that might have interfered with Gordon’s sighting. Yet, in spite of a deep desire for vengeance, the retribution earned by a black deed, she shuddered. As, propping himself on his elbow, Gordon drew a bead on the leading raider she covered her eyes with her hands.
And Bull? As the raiders had passed him on the way down every brute line of their evil visages had seared itself on his brain—the beast mouths, blunt noses, conical ears, gross cheek-bones; the sloping foreheads, in the center of which his imagination placed a small, round, purplish spot. Now, as they returned, his dark face in its implacable hate was the face of Death itself—the Death Gordon and Lee felt hovering near.
In the most tense moments, while the being is under shock of a tragic emotion, the brain will sometimes play strange tricks, register trifles too light for notice in normal times. As the first horse rounded the bend below Bull recognized it for a mare that Lee sometimes rode; a flighty, brainless creature, that would shy at its own shadow when nothing better offered.
About fifteen passed him before the head of the first raider showed below. Instantly Bull’s rifle flew up; the rifle that never missed, its sights lined true on the spot, the purple spot of his imagination. But the trigger did not fall. Passing on down, his glance had shown him that the last two raiders were still below Jake’s station.
He lowered the rifle again, intending, as Sliver had divined, to let three or four of the raiders go on up toward Gordon; and, with the action, vengeance passed out of his hands. If there was anything in the world the flighty mare preferred to shy at, it was a snake. Perhaps a haunting memory of a bitten fetlock in her colthood was responsible for the preference. Be that as it may, when with a dry staccato warning a fat rattler raised its deadly head from bunched, glistening coils on the edge of the path the mare whirled and darted madly downhill, leader in a mad stampede.
A hoarse yell marked the first raider’s realization of his danger. With spur and quirt, he tried to force his mount against the bank. But a hatchet head intervened, the wedging body forced in between sent man and beast sideways over the cliff.