Quesada stepped to one side. With his open hand, he struck the horse a resounding thwack upon the rump. The pony leaped forward, the bristle of flower stalk painfully rubbing his spine. Ere he could recover from the shock of the blow and pause to lessen the aggravating pricking under the saddle, Quesada snapped out his revolver and discharged it in the air behind him—bang, bang! Exasperated and thoroughly frightened, the horse fled precipitantly down the road.
While the winding gutter of gorge detonated with the hoof-clatter of the racing horse and while the rock walls flung back and forth, like sounding-boards, the sharp metallic explosions of the pistol, Jacinto Quesada bounded up the brushy side to where, behind the feathery wig-plant, he had flung the canvas saddlebags.
He was none too quick. Like a louder echo of the echoes sounded up the gorge, of a sudden, the crang of a carbine; then the thundering hoof beats of horses careering down at full tilt; and then the voices of men lunging up in the dread challenge and command of the police:
"Alto a la Guardia Civil! Halt for the Civil Guard!"
Quesada crouched behind the whitish-green thicket of sumach, and waited tense as a trigger at half-cock.
Around the bend up the road drove into view like a lean racing terrier a wiry rough-coated pony, hoofs pounding in a quick rataplan, barrel low to the dust, and ears flattened sharply back. Upright in the saddle, a carbine across the hollow of one arm, was the tall sergeant of police, linen sun-shield flying straight behind like a white guidon snapping in a wind.
"Don't shoot, Montara!" he called back from an eager keen-edged face. "Don't shoot till you see the hair on his neck!"
"Shoot his horse!" answered a roaring shout. "Carajo! In all our lives, we may never get another such chance at Jacinto Quesada!"
Around the bend, like a screaming projectile, lunged another pony, neck extended, nostrils blowing red, and the ugly policeman Montara standing a-tiptoe in the stirrups. Montara was like some wild Arab in a mad display of horsemanship. He swayed back and forth; he waved the carbine in one long apelike hand. Carried away by the lust of the chase, he shouted repeatedly from his blood-darkened countenance:
"Alto a la Guardia Civil! Alto, alto! Alto a la Guardia Civil!"