[XLII: BULL DREAMS A DREAM!]
After the mogul glided away, Bull, Lee, and Gordon crouched in the sage-brush while the revueltoso engine approached. With a roar it came at them out of the night, its beam light shooting an angry glance ahead. For a moment they saw it on the high railroad bank in black silhouette against the moonlit sky; an engine and two box-cars that swung and swayed under a heavy top load of soldiers beneath a luminous trail of smoke. On the first car a machine-gun showed in skeleton outline on spider legs. For a second the train loomed in their sight, then roared past, leaving the moon staring down at them through a yellow cloud of dust.
Rising, Bull held a brief council. The eastern hills had swung in while they traveled northward, now lay only a few miles away.
“We’ll gain into them a piece, then rest up for a couple of hours,” he said. “We kain’t afford more. On foot, this-a-way, we’ll have to travel at night an’ hide up during the day—unless we chance on a rancho where we kin steal horses! Of course, it’s terrible on you, Missy. But if you kin stan’ it for a little longer—” He stopped as Lee shook, as he thought, with a sob.
It was, however, merely a little laugh strangled at birth by tire and trouble. “It seemed so funny that I, with hundreds of horses of my own, should have to turn rustler.” With a little mothering pat that somehow reversed their positions and brought him, the big, dark giant, under her fostering care, she added: “Don’t worry about me. If I could only make you some coffee! Do something to justify my existence! Here, give me a rifle. I can at least carry something.”
But Gordon took it from her. Bull shouldered the cartridges and provisions. Then, like dim ghosts, they moved over the desert, winding through sage, palo verde, stinkbrush, on their way to the obscure hills. Though Lee pleaded, time and again, to carry something, they obstinately refused—and it was well that they did. When Bull called a halt, at last, on the crest of the first hill she stood weaving and swaying until Gordon seated her on a flat rock.
“Don’t dare to move,” he ordered, “till I get you something to eat.”
They had left of their own provisions only coffee, crackers, and salt meat. But after “Alberto” cut off the engine Gordon had “requisitioned” his tortillas and chile stew—plenty for three. Once again Lee wished she could make them coffee. Fire being impossible, her dominant instinct still found a vent. While Gordon sat munching leathery tortillas his head was suddenly seized; with her wet handkerchief she washed the engine soot off his face.
Neither did Bull escape. “There!” Bestowing a little, loving box on Gordon’s ear, she turned on Bull. The cool, damp, soft hands seized and washed and wiped his black visage just as though he had been a child. Whereafter she gave a little sigh of satisfaction.
“Well, you’re half-clean, anyway.”