Suspecting an ambush, the revueltosos came forward slowly. Quarter of an hour passed, indeed, before the first head poked up from behind the opposite bank. Another quarter slid by; then, emboldened by the long silence, three appeared in the open.
“They have gone! Bring up the horses!”
The leader’s call, in Spanish, carried across to Bull. Also, while they waited, he heard their conversation:
“If Prudencia had sent in to La Mancha yesterday morning for more men, we had caught them last night.”
“Si,” came the answer. “But he wanted the girl for himself.”
“The swine!” The epithet was set in vile oaths. “But he is cured forever of that complaint. Hombre! but they shoot well, these gringos. The bullet took him squarely between the eyes.”
There was more of it—their present hope to run the gringos down with horses after they gained the levels beyond the Pass; the disposition they would make of them after capture. Unaware of the glittering black eyes only a hundred yards away, they talked on till a scrape of hoofs, hubbub of voices on the other side of the ridge announced the arrival of the horses.
A minute thereafter they came riding in single file, slipping and sliding, most of the time on their beasts’ haunches, down into the rock pocket below. At the bottom, the first man looked up a little nervously. Then his voice rose up to Bull, crouching among the sage:
“They are surely gone. Vamos!”
A scraping of hoofs followed. But Bull was in no hurry. There was room for all in the “bore.” He waited. Till he caught the labored breathing of the first beast he waited, then—with a sudden pry of the rifle-barrel he launched the first boulder. One after the other, as fast as he could pry them, he sent the others thundering after. Then, clubbed rifle waving like a windblown reed above his head, eyes ablaze, teeth bared, leaping and bounding like some mad gorilla, he shot into the midst of the crushed, struggling mass of horses and men. He was in among them almost before the last boulder struck down a horse in its rebound from the opposite hill.