Jake’s tone carried conviction even to Gordon. Only Bull was not deceived. After the other two had ridden on he looked at Jake. A lift of the eyebrow, slight shake of the head, touch of the forefinger to the knee—he knew all. Thereafter each burst of rifle-fire, long pause, explained itself. He saw Sliver waiting till the revueltosos came out in the open. The slow rhythm of later shots showed him firing along the ridge. A sudden burst of sharpshooting at sundown, following silence, explained themselves. His glance at Jake, the latter’s slow shake of the head, signaled then that all was over.
While they were traveling down the long slope toward the railroad the sun had lowered till they could see the telegraph-poles running, a sharp black fence, across the smoldering sky. Southward a toy station rose from the dead-flat plain under a velvet plume of smoke. Bull had laid his course to cross the tracks miles ahead of it. By traveling all night, they could then gain the mountains that bared iron teeth along the western sky-line; but they would be no nearer the border than when they began the fight that morning.
The thought was strong in their minds when Jake leveled his range glasses at the dark smoke plume. “Enjine an’ five cars.”
He handed the glasses to Bull, and before the latter’s keen sight the lenses laid the familiar outlines, of a revolutionary train, a-bristle on top with humanity. Even at the distance, the flash and flare of gay rebozos told they were mostly women, and that told all. “Nobody there but women and wounded. Belongs to the gang that’s chasing us.”
“A hundred miles to El Paso,” Jake spoke. “Three days’ horseback? Three hours with that old mogul?”
“Golly!” The idea fastened on Gordon. “Couldn’t we?” In place of their present plodding he saw the telegraph-poles, rocks, hills, flying past as they sped northward in the engine.
“On’y women and wounded?” Jake repeated it, musingly.
“Dark in half an hour?” Bull added: “They kedn’t tell us from their own. ’Course we should lose the horses.” With his accustomed caution he read the reverse of the shield. “If anything went wrong—we’d be left afoot on the desert.”
“No worse than we are,” Jake argued. “These beasts have been running sence daylight; are clean plugged out. Even if they carry us across to the mountains we’re not sure of feed nor water—an’ still a hundred miles from the border.”
“But Sliver?” Lee protested. “We can’t leave him.”