“Well?” Gordon protested. “How can I do it better than by staying here?”
“What?” Sliver looked scandalized. “Us take a chanst of her being widowed after all the trouble we had getting her married? No, sir-ree! Git out.”
“Come on, Son, you’re delaying the game.” Bull had already joined Lee. His heavy command came floating up from below. Albeit with a shrug, Gordon obeyed.
The next commanding ridge lay nearly a mile away, and after the others had started back toward it Jake nodded toward the enemy. “Bet you they’ve split already an’ are moving around us. Now if we do the same, keeping well out of sight, we’ll mebbe get another crack at ’em.”
And so it was. When, after a half-mile détour through limestone and sage chaparral, the halves of the raiders’ party showed in the open two rifles opened in concert at points a mile apart; two more riderless horses went scampering away before the others gained back to cover. From the wide base of their triangle Jake and Sliver then came galloping back and joined Bull at its apex; and thus they moved back and back, as the nature of the country permitted, with no more danger than that of an occasional bullet, fired at long range, singing overhead.
While they retreated the sun blazed up in the east, rolled on around its southerly course, superheating the dreary prospect till it glowed like an oven. All that time Bull was looking anxiously for a cross-ridge behind which they might swing their course to the north and east. But with the regularity of the waves of the sea the ridges rolled on back in unbroken succession toward the railroad. With the enemy spread widely upon their flanks a turning movement was impossible. They could only roll back with the limestone waves, trusting that the railroad would bring forth no new enemy.
Unfortunately the desert was growing rougher. Dry watercourses crosscut the sage that now rose tall as a mounted man. The going was rendered more difficult by outcroppings of limestone that sometimes raised an impassable barrier, forcing a détour. Worst of all, the denser growths permitted closer pursuit. At the last stand made by Jake and Sliver, midway of the afternoon, bullets came spitting out of the sage less than two hundred yards away.
“If ’twas on’y black powder they was using,” Sliver bitterly complained, “we’d stan’ some chance. A feller could bust into the middle of their smoke.”
“You’re onreasonable,” Jake answered. He went on, sarcastically, quoting from an editorial in the last American paper that had come to Los Arboles: “In order that these here bandits kin exercise the ‘sacred right of revolution to reg’late their own internal affairs’ your Uncle Samuel has kindly supplied ’em with the latest smokeless cartridge. Thanks to his benevolence, some one’s going to get hurt pretty soon.”
He was right. A scattering volley, fired from that very ridge after they evacuated it, overtook them in the hollow below and brought down Sliver’s horse. Hanging on to Jake’s stirrup leather, he made the next ridge, but one of the pack-animals had to be given to him and its load abandoned.