The freed men cast covert glances at the guards, followed their every move with cat-like slyness. The little Chinaman began a falsetto sing-song under his breath, which might have been a prayer to his protecting joss. One of the guards turned in his saddle and called some jocular order to the prisoners. They moved on in the wine-light of the sunset, falling precisely into the line they had held when chained, their eyes vigilant for every move of a hand on the part of the mounted men.
The rurales now carried their rifles swung free across the saddles.
Though he could understand no word of the muttered scraps of speech passed between man and man behind him, the magnetic fear waves possessing all the rest began to prompt Grant to some comprehension. The coming night—dropping of the chain—those rifles unslung from shoulders and carried free across the saddles:—did these things presage the near end of this farce of a pilgrimage across the desert to a court?
Light now was nearly gone from the western sky and the guards were riding farther away from the trudging line, deliberately inviting some one to offer himself for fair target practice while gunsights still could be seen. Grant faced the hazard squarely. Certain he was that none of the eight would see another sunrise, that butcher’s work would commence the minute sporting chances were definitively ignored by the victims. He was of no mind to be the passive party to a hog killing. Better a quick dash—a bullet from behind—
The line of men had just emerged from an arroyo with almost perpendicular sides; the bed of the dry stream was thick with shadow. Grant leaped from line and ran straight for the guard who rode between himself and the course of the stream. Almost at his stirrup he swerved and cut under the horse’s rump.
Shouts. A shot gone wild. Grant, zigzagging, was at the brink of the arroyo. Two shots almost as one. A lance of fire through his shoulder. Up went his arms and he plunged headlong into the gulf of blackness.
[CHAPTER VIII]
THE HEART OF BENICIA
The Desert of Altar is transcendence of silence. From the savage Growler range in Arizona south to the obsidian bastions of Pinacate, by the dead Gulf, is space to crowd five million people with their tumult of cities, their crash of machines, hoot of locomotives and shriek of steel under stress. Yet in all this blank waste not a sound.