The waggon had pulled up to the front gate, somebody shouted, I heard Miss Pansy screeching like a cougar, and a man came surging past the side of the house, lifting his gun to draw a bead on Curly as she ran. I jumped behind, felled him with my gun-butt, and bolted.
What with Miss Pansy's shrieks, and the shouting of men, the clatter had got to be a whole disturbance, rousing a quiet neighborhood. As I ran I could hear Miss Blossom calling, "Go 'way, you rude men! Scat!"
It seemed to me that time was worth a million dollars a second while I held the back gate by the stable, and Curly rode through with the horses straight on to the open range. As I swung to the saddle, I heard the house door battered in with a crash of breaking glass.
"Hold on," said Curly, reining in her horse, "I was forgettin'."
The searchers were swarming through the house, and for my part I was full content to depart without telling them any good-bye.
"You're scart," says Curly. "You coward! You stay heah!"
Then feeling for blood with her spurs, she sailed at full gallop along the outer side of the garden fence. At the first shot from the yard she ducked, throwing herself until she hung Indian fashion along the off side of her horse. A bullet trimmed my back hair as I followed, gun flames blazed from the back porch and the windows, as we shot past the house. The bullets were singing all round us, our horses were crazy with fright, but then we swung round the end of the garden fence, running full tilt against the standing team of horses which the police had left in the road. The shock stampeded them, but Curly swerved clear of their rush, rolled back into the saddle, raced abreast, and shot both horses down. A minute more, and the firing died away behind us, for we were racing neck-and-neck across the desert. Curly had left the police to follow afoot, but now she began to weaken, for, because she had played the man, she broke down and sobbed—a woman.
We had been running maybe two hours when we pulled up on the top of a hill to rest our horses. Far down to southward the electric lights in the city made a silver haze of small specks glistening as though a scrap of sky had fallen there. High in the south Orion rode guard upon the star herds, and the night was so still that we were scared to speak. I wanted to smoke, but on a night like that the striking of a match may be seen for miles around, so I took a bite at my plug and ate tobacco instead. Then as Curly and I sat on a rock together listening, I heard a bear cough because his nose got dusty, grubbing for ants; a coyote was singing the hunger-song, and miles away to the east a ranche dog answered him. Then Curly's horse scrunched up a tuft of grass, and my beast pawing, startled a rattlesnake. The little woman beside me whispered then—
"Shorely the Lawd makes His big medicine for us, for snakes and robbers, wolves and b'ars. Only the folk down tha cayn't see Him, 'cause they got electric lights instead of stars."
"Which them two pore ladies," says I, "gets gun-flame by way of lamps to cheer them up to-night."