“Then let’s be getting along,” said the first man.
“Any message I wrote you would not deliver; it would put a rope round your neck, too. And, Mr. Lem Speed, with your store, and bank, and house, and wife, and son, I hope you will live to see them come to ruin and disgrace.”
I wish that I had never spoken these weak, discreditable words; but he who has not been tested cannot know the bitterness of such a test as this.
A horse was led to me, and I got on without aid, a man on each side of me. Memory after this records nothing. We must have been some time—I think we walked—in reaching the other end of the valley, yet I cannot recall what was spoken around me, or whether or not anything was spoken; I can recall only the sides of the valley passing, and the warmer sense of the sun on my shoulders, and the vivid scent of the sage-brush. What firmness or lack of firmness I might have displayed at the very end I can never know. Before we halted at the fatal tree of execution, and while my rage was still sustaining me, a noise of rattling stones caused us all to look upward, and there, galloping down the steep trail, wildly waving and shouting to us, was Scipio Le Moyne. It reeled through me! I was saved!
He plunged into the midst of us at breakneck speed, drew up so short that his horse slid, and burst out furiously—not to my captors, but to me. “You need a nurse!” he cried hoarsely. “Any travelling you do should be in a baby coach.”
Breath failed him, he sat in his saddle, bowed over and panting, hands shaking, face dripping with sweat, shirt drenched, as was his trembling horse. After a minute he looked at Speed. “So I’m in time, my God! I’ve ridden all night. I’d have been here an hour sooner only I forgot about the turn at the corral. Here. That’s the way I knowed it.”
He handed over my letter, left for him at the E-A ranch. This, with a few words from him, cleared me. All that I had declared was verified; they saw what they had been about to do.
“Well, now, well!” exclaimed one, grinning.
“To think of us getting fooled that way!” another remarked, grinning.
“But it’s all right now,” said a third, grinning.