Hand in hand, chance-caught, and running swiftly, Lynette and Deveril were in time to escape the first of their pursuers, a crowd of men who got in one another's way, and who were too lately from the lighted room of the house to see clearly outside. Behind Gallup's House was the little creek which supplied the town with its water; it wound here across a tiny flat, an open space save for its big cottonwoods. The two, knowing that in the first heat of the chase opening at their heels they were running from death, sped like two winged shadows merged into one. After a hundred yards they hurled themselves into breast-high bushes, a thick tangle—a growth which, in such a mad rush as theirs, was no less formidable than a rock wall. They cast quick glances backward; a score of men—appearing, in their widely spread formation and from their cries and the racket of scuffling boots, to be a hundred—shut off all retreat and made hopeless any thought to turn to right or left.
"Down!" whispered Deveril. "Crawl for it! And quiet!"
On hands and knees they crawled into the thicket. Already hands and faces were scratched, but they did not feel the scratches; already their clothes were torn in many places. In a wild scramble they went on, squeezing through narrow spaces, lying flat, wriggling, getting to hands and knees again. And all the while with nerves jumping at each breaking of a twig. It was only the shouting voices and the pounding boots behind them that drowned in their pursuers' ears the sounds they made.
"Still!" admonished Babe Deveril in a whisper.
And very still they lay, side by side, panting, in the heart of the thicket. A voice called out, not twenty paces behind them:
"They're in there!" And another voice, louder than the first and more insistent, they thanked their stars, boomed:
"No, no! They skirted the brush, off to the left, beating it for the open! After 'em, boys!" And still other voices shouted and, it would seem, every man of them had glimpsed his own tricking shadow and had his own wild opinion.
Thus, for a brief enough moment, the pursuit was baffled.
"Slow and quiet does it!" It was for the third time Babe Deveril's whisper, his lips close to her hair. "I see an opening. Follow close."
Lynette, still lying face down, lifted herself a little way upon her two hands and looked after him.