Told in the Hills: A Novel

by Marah Ellis Ryan

"I've come for you," was all Genesee said; then he turned to the others.

"Are you willing to follow me?" he asked, raising his voice a little. "The horses can't go through where I've got to take you; you'll have to leave them."

A voice close to his elbow put in a word of expostulation against the desertion of the horses. Genesee turned on the speaker with an oath.

"You may command in a quiet camp, but we're outside of it now, and I put just a little less value on your opinion than on any man's in the gulch. This is a question for every man to answer for himself. You've lost their lives for them if they're kept here till daylight. I'll take them out if they're ready to come."

There was no dissenting voice. Compared with the inglorious death awaiting them in the gulch, the deliverance was a God-send. They did not just see how it was to be effected; but the strange certainty of hope with which they turned to the man they had left behind as a horse-thief was a thing surprising to them all, when they had time to think of it—in the dusk of the morning, they had not.

He appeared among them as if a deliverer had materialized from the snow-laden branches of cedar, or from the close-creeping clouds of the mountain. They had felt themselves touched by a superstitious thrill when he was found in their midst; but they knew that, come as he might, be what he would, they had in him one to whom the mountains were as an open book, as the Indians knew when they tendered him the significant name of Lamonti.

Captain Holt was the only rebel on the horse question; to add those to the spoils of the Indians was a bitter thing for him to do.

"It looks as if we were not content with them taking half our stock, but rode up here to leave them the rest," he said, aggressively, to nobody in particular. "I've a notion to leave only the carcasses."

"Not this morning," broke in the scout. "We've no time to wait for work of that sort. Serves you right to lose them, too, for your damned blunders. Come along if you want to get out of this—single file, and keep quiet."

It was no time for argument or military measures for insubordination; and bitter as the statement of inefficiency was, Captain Holt knew there were some grounds for it, and knew that, in the eyes of the men, he was judged from the same standpoint. The blind raid with green scouts did seem, looking back at it, like a headlong piece of folly. How much of folly the whole attack was, they did not as yet realize.