He heard, too, his own answer, “Sure, ma’am, I’ll come straight to you.”
Again he was looking back at her, smiling over Betty’s shoulder, and—the bougainvillea shriveled into a lace of black around empty windows that stared with fiery eyes from seared walls.
In the intensity of his visioning the horrible dénouement came almost with the original shock. He sprang up with a groan of agony.
While he had sat there, musing, the pallid first lights had grown and strengthened, flared up in the crimson fires of sunrise. Beneath, the rugged walls of the Pass flamed in apricot lights pitted with purple shadows. Far down, just where the trail began to climb from a narrow interior valley, came a silver flash as a scabbard took the first gleam of the sun.
It announced the revueltosos of the brigada Gonzales! Her murderers! Answering it, the lines of sorrow, deep-plowed through his face, drew into deeper furrows of hate. His coal-black eyes lit with a maniac glitter. The knuckles of the hand that held his rifle-barrel like a club, gleamed whitely through the skin. When, crouching suddenly, he peered downward from behind a boulder at the file of horsemen now wriggling like a loose-jointed snake along the narrow valley, he was again the animal Sliver and Jake had seen looking down on the revueltosos in the fonda cañon. Big, black, burly, he looked more like a bear than a man.
If he had followed his own desire he would have waited and brought the long fight to a conclusion there and then. But even the deadly hate that sent slow shivers coursing through his huge frame was dominated by his care for Lee. Time was the first consideration; time for the fugitives to make good their escape. Though his rifle was empty, he still had his revolver, a heavy Colt’s .45. Having looked over his boulders and poised them in balance with smaller stones, he passed down the water-course and climbed to the crest of the opposite bank.
Lying there, he looked down on the revueltosos who had begun to climb up through the chaparral. The mountainside fell off so steeply it was impossible for them to deploy in line, and, knowing it, he sighted high and fired.
The bullet fell short, as he knew it would. But at the crack the revueltosos tumbled out of their saddles; the next second disappeared with their horses in the sage. To them it was the reopening of the “fight and run” of yesterday’s warfare, and, taught by its lessons, they moved cautiously up through the brush, seeking higher positions from which to return his fire.
Fully aware of their belief, Bull encouraged it by answering, at intervals, the bullets that began to clip the rocks, plump in the dust about him. But he husbanded his shots, firing only when, after a long silence on his part, the foe came creeping on up.
Six shots, fired quarter of an hour apart. To Bull they were mile-posts, each recording a stage in Lee’s advance toward safety. As clearly as though he had been with them he saw her, tired, limping a little, but moving steadily on with Gordon’s help. And his imaginings ran with the facts. Just about the time that he fired his last shot and ran back, down into the gully and up the bore of his huge stone cannon to the plateau above, Gordon sighted, far away on a rise, a speck of white that marked the international boundary line, and moving dots that presently grew into a United States cavalry patrol.