“I must keep on, and then bear to the right,” Hi said. “This won’t last as long as it did yesterday.”
He kept on for some hours at a walk, till he was stopped by a bog. A river or large stream which perhaps ran into the lake at its western end here had silted up its mouth over some acres of forest. A rotting mush barred the way; there was no passing. As moving to the right brought him to reeds growing in water, he moved to the left, uphill, until his horse stopped.
He had saved a feed of corn against an emergency: the horse nosed at it, but would not eat. “Poor beast,” Hi thought, “he’s in a pretty bad way. I’ll rub him down and give him a rest. If we both rest for a little it will do no harm.” After grooming the horse, he contrived what shelter he could, and fell asleep. He woke once, to find the rain streaming on his face, woke a second time, to find that the rain had stopped; then sleep took hold of him body and soul and held him as one dead.
He slept all through the afternoon and would have slept longer far into the night, but that he was suddenly startled by the shattering of a volley of shots from some place far away. “There it is,” he cried, starting up, “that is Don Manuel coming to the rescue.” Other shots followed, some, at first, close together in volleys, the later ones singly. After the shots, listening intently as he was, he thought that he heard the sound of many horses going together at a fast trot. Some such noise there was, it rang out, died down, clopped and clinked and then clattered. “Of course, it can’t be Don Manuel,” he said, coming to himself. “But it may be the Whites driving away the Reds. Anyhow, people are there: the forest ends. It may even be Anselmo. Come on, horse, here’s the world again. ‘They must be men, because they’re fighting, and they must be civilised because they’re doing it with guns.’ ”
The horse seemed the better either for the rest or the sound of his fellows; when Hi mounted, he set off with some kind of spirit. In a quarter of an hour he came to something which made the horse whinny; it was a trail.
“Here it is,” Hi cried, “the very little trail which Anton spoke of. Now I shall be out of it in no time. Just as well, too, because I’ve slept a lot longer than I thought: it is almost night.”
The sun was indeed behind Melchior; the birds had homed and were now screaming before falling silent. The patches of sky over the forest turned slowly scarlet, paled yellow, then changed to a green in which stars were bright. The sparks of the fireflies began to pass upon the air: cold silence and darkness came with them into the forest, so that Hi shivered. His heart, none the less, was beating with hope, because the horse was going with confidence. Then from somewhere ahead came the distant lowing of cattle, which brought tears to Hi’s eyes. It was the noise made by the cows of home coming into the barton at Tencombe: now here, in this strange place, it told of the homes of men, where life was lived wisely, away from towns, and far from the madness of rulers like Don Lopez.
Suddenly, from somewhere ahead, a single shot rang out: it may have been far away, but in that still air it sounded near by. It was followed almost at once by the sound of the gallop of a horse, which was either running away or being ridden by a man in fear for his life. It stretched at a full gallop across his front and so away into the west: one horse only, mad with fear, or with his rider’s fear, going at his utmost: from what?
“I wish I knew from what,” Hi thought. “Listen.”
He listened: many men were talking and shouting. Then there came the noise of many horses together: seventy or a hundred; “as many as in a hunt at home,” moving along a paven place at a walk, then rising to a fast trot together. “And they are within two miles of me,” Hi thought, “going from me.” He shouted, but had no answer save the sound of the horses dying away into the west. The cattle lowed again. “There must be a ranch there,” Hi said. “I’ll go to where those cows are.” He hailed again and was answered by little white owls which followed him on both sides, perhaps for grubs or beetles kicked up by the horse in his going.