Marks took aim at the man waiting there so coolly. He fired, and a tide of red stained the other man's shirt, near the shoulder. Then something happened. The Halfbreed's arm rose quickly. A six-shooter spat twice.
He turned to us. "I didn't want to do it, boys, but you see he druv' me to it. I'm sorry. He druv' me to it."
Marks lay in a huddled, quivering heap. He was shot through the heart and quite dead.
CHAPTER VIII
We were camping in Paradise Valley. Before us and behind us the great Cheechako army laboured along with infinite travail. We had suffered, but the trail of the land was near its end. And what an end! With every mile the misery and difficulty of the way seemed to increase. Then we came to the trail of Rotting Horses.
Dead animals we had seen all along the trail in great numbers, but the sight as we came on this particular place beggared description. There were thousands of them. One night we dragged away six of them before we could find room to put up the tent. There they lay, sprawling horribly, their ribs protruding through their hides, their eyes putrid in the sunshine. It was like a battlefield, hauntingly hideous.
And every day was adding to their numbers. The trail ran over great boulders covered with icy slush, through which the weary brutes sank to their bellies. Struggling desperately, down they would come between two boulders. Then their legs would snap like pipe-stems, and there usually they were left to die.
One would see, jammed in the cleft of a rock, the stump of a hoof, or sticking up sharply, the jagged splinter of a leg; while far down the bluff lay the animal to which it belonged. One would see the poor dead brutes lying head and tail for an hundred yards at a stretch. One would see them deserted and desperate, wandering round foraging for food. They would come to the camp at night whinnying pitifully, and with a look of terrible entreaty on their starved faces. Then one would take pity on them—and shoot them.
I remember stumbling across a big, heavy horse one night in the gloom. It was swaying from side to side, and as I drew near I saw its throat was hideously cut. It looked at me with such agony in its eyes that I put my handkerchief over its face, and, with the blow of an axe, ended its misery. The most spirited of the horses were the first to fall. They broke their hearts in gallant effort. Goaded to desperation, sometimes they would destroy themselves, throw themselves frantically over the bluff. Oh, it was horrible! horrible!