“You can make it yet!” he panted. “Go; don’t think of me; I will stop them here!”
He knew he could neither stop them nor turn them aside. She did not want to leave him, but fear tore at her heart; the herd was on them again, though the halt had been so brief.
“Go!” he yelled, and struck the horse with the shining revolver.
Its quick leap almost threw her, but she clutched the horn of the saddle and raced on.
Clayton turned to face the mad stampede. That line of tossing heads and clicking horns was not a hundred yards away. He looked at the little revolver and smiled. The strange light which had so startled Justin was again in his eyes.
“I will not leave you to be trodden to death by them, old fellow,” he said to the horse; “you deserve a better fate than that.”
With the words, he put the pistol to the head of the trembling horse and fired. It was but a small pellet of lead, but it went true, and the horse fell. He stepped up to its body and sent the second shot at the leading steer. He glanced at the sky an instant, then at Sibyl fleeing away along the cañon wall in the direction of the distant ranch buildings. The strange light deepened in his eyes.
“I have saved her,” he whispered; “and even God can die, when the reason is great enough!”
Sibyl did not hear those shots in the confusion that clamored behind her, and she had not courage to look back. Having lost her ribboned whip in the fall, she beat the horse with her gloved hand. A numbing pain gripped her heart and made her breathing quick and heavy. At times her sight blurred, and then fear smote hardest, for she felt that she was falling. Yet she rode on, reeling in the deep saddle, and when faint maintained her position by clinging to the saddle horn. At the door of the ranch house she fell forward on the neck of the horse and slipped in a limp heap to the ground; but she was up again, with hand pressed to her heart, when Pearl Harkness dashed out to assist her.
Behind Pearl came Lucy Davison and Mary Jasper. They had heard the thundering of hoofs, and but a minute before had seen Sibyl ride into view at that mad pace from behind the screening stables. She had outridden the stampeded cattle. The curving cañon wall had turned them at last, and they were beginning to mill.