“Hooray, I’ve shaken them off, anyhow,” he thought to himself, as, after ten minutes or so of hard riding he heard the shouts and cries of the Mexicans grow faint behind him.
But in this assumption Jack had reckoned without his host, in the shape of Black Ramon’s famous sable steed.
As he drew rein he heard distinctly the sound of a horse coming toward his halting place at a terrific gait. No other horse than Black Ramon’s could have kept up such a speed over such ground, and Jack, with a sinking heart, realized that if he did not act quickly he was likely to fall into the outlaw’s hands once more.
The spot where he had halted was a small rocky eminence surrounded by the luxuriant fern and scrub growth which clothed the rugged floor of the canyon.
To turn his panting animal and head off into the dense growth was the work of an instant. Hardly had he vanished, however, before the fern parted once more and disclosed the form of Ramon’s black horse with the outlaw himself upon his glossy back.
Like Jack, Ramon halted as he reached the little eminence, and listened intently. Despite the speed he had made in pursuit, the black showed hardly a trace of fatigue. His finely carved nostrils dilated a little more than usual and his large, intelligent eyes shone more brightly perhaps, but that was all. He pricked his delicate ears and seemed to be as keenly on the alert as his master, whose face, just now, wore an expression of almost diabolic rage and baffled fury.
In the meantime, Jack was loping along at as fast a pace as he dared to go. The ground, as has been said, was rough and stony to a degree,—the worst sort of going for one who wished to conceal the sound of his advance. But there was no help for it; press on the boy must, or fall into the hands of men whom he knew would give him short shrift indeed.
“If ever this old plug stumbles—”
Such was the thought in Jack’s mind when the exact event he had dreaded transpired.
His purloined animal gave a plunge forward as its feet caught in a rock and a tangle of fern.