Like two boys they looked up at her through the dusk. Gordon had taken his punishment with a grin. Now he paid for it with a kiss that drew from Bull a grave smile. “Sleep, now, you kids,” he admonished them. “Two hours an’ we’ll have to be moving again.”
“You, too!” Lee insisted.
Exhausted by days of riding and fighting, she and Gordon slid almost at once into the deep, dreamless slumber of tired youth. Till the slower rhythm of their breathing informed him of the fact, Bull lay quiet. Then, rising stealthily, he stood over them, a dim giant figure guarding their sleep while the moon sailed down to the mountains. Fifteen miles to the southward Jake was playing his last lone “hand.” He was in Bull’s mind when a distant rumble followed a flash that lit the night sky with calcium red.
“Something doing there.” Though he could have no accurate knowledge, Bull nevertheless put his intuition into words. “Bet you Jake had a finger in it.”
Stooping, he awoke the sleepers, then shouldering the rifles and provisions, led off in the gloom, leaving Gordon to help Lee. And she needed it. The nap had left her sleepier than ever. Like a child aroused in the night, she yawned, stretched; still her eyes would not open.
Yet she made light of it. “My feet seem to belong to some one else. All the time they are trying to go off by themselves. Outch!”
It was the barbed thorn of a nopal, which hurt worse coming out than it did going in; the first of a series. Indeed, “cat’s claws” and “crucifixion thorns” lay everywhere in prickly ambush. “Spanish bayonet” scratched their shoes, scored their leather puttees. Now the sage would rise high above their heads, then leave them to scramble in the open among limestone boulders. Stripped to its bones by torrential rains of the last season, the ground heaved and tossed in pits and hummocks. In daylight it would have been heavy going. By night it was heart-breaking. When, after an hour of it, Bull called a halt the two laid down at once; in five seconds were fast asleep.
This time he allowed only twenty minutes, then got them up and pressed on again. So, alternately walking and sleeping, they gained ten miles to the north and east before dawn burst, a red explosion, through the first pale lights.
Its weird illumination revealed the same dreary expanse of limestone and scrub desert they had fought over the preceding day. It also showed Lee, pale, tired, limping, but cheerful.
She nodded when Bull proposed that they should keep on till sunrise. “To be sure! We’ll have all day to rest.”