This time, a little breathless, hurrying, careless of the failing light, she did not watch her footholds and a large and permanent looking stone turned under her, almost tripping her, and went hurtling down.
“It won’t—it won’t—it won’t hit him!” she told herself vehemently, in prayerful assertion, but, if it did not, it grazed him closely enough to have the same result, for she could hear him rearing and crashing in a way that made his former panic seem like composure by comparison. Presently, the sounds warned her, he had headed back toward Marble Peak and the conflagration.
And now the episode left off being an amusing little adventure and assumed the outlines of a grim task. Ginger shook off her temper and her disgust at her own carelessness, and looked intently about her. It would be half an hour, and perhaps more, before she brought Snort up, and she must make sure of finding her station on the trail, and Pedro. She mentally catalogued an oddly square rock, a grotesquely twisted root, took off her scarlet bandanna and tied it to a low limb, before she made her cautious descent.
Two hours, dark and difficult ones, were to pass before she found her landmarks again. Her little wish to do her lover a service had come largely true: she had toiled in his cause as she had never toiled before in all her vigorous young life.
Snort had reverted swiftly to type; he was ’Rome Ojeda’s horse, and not Dean Wolcott’s. Memories of remorseless punishments for misdemeanors like this came back to him; clearly he weighed in his mind the relative tragedies of proceeding into the heart of the burning district and of permitting himself to be caught. He would turn, snorting with fear as a gust of wind brought hot smoke and stinging sparks, and start backward, yet when Ginger, edging and inching craftily closer, the velvet of her voice roughening with huskiness—“Steady, boy, Snort ... good ... old ... boy ...”—put out her hand to take his rope he would wheel again, choosing the red danger ahead.
Ginger’s hat went in the first quarter of an hour and her hair was dragged down and filled with leaves and bits of broken vines and there was a red scratch on her cheek; she was hot, breathless, dripping. The easy and comfortable thing which she would have called her religion was a quaint quilting of Alexander McVeagh’s rugged Scotch Presbyterianism and old Manuela’s handy and available santos, Aleck’s sane and hearty creed of playing the game, and her own childishly cherished habit of wishing on white horses and red-headed girls, on loads of hay and shooting stars, and she brought it out now and aired it and shook it into service and kept up her courage, for there was a brief period when it seemed that she would not only fail in bringing the wild horse to her lover but would inevitably lose herself.
“Steady, Snort, old boy ... good ... old ... boy!” she would croon, adding, between tight shut teeth—“Devil—demon—fiend! Oh, if I only knew what it was that Balaam did to the horse in The Virginian I’d do it to you—when I catch you—only harder!—No, I wouldn’t, Snort, poor old boy, dear old boy.... Good ... old ... boy....”
The climax came suddenly, after all. Snort twisted his rope round a tree, went three times round himself, and was prisoned, pulling back, snorting shrilly, throwing himself twice, but standing still at last, showing the whites of his eyes in the moonlight which now poured down into the cañon in a silver flood, his heaving sides lathered with sweat.
Ginger sat limply down close by and leaned her head back against a cool rock. “I tried just as hard as that, to get away from him—and stay away from him—” she said, grimly. “But I’m going back, and you’re going with me.” She sighed, utterly tired and utterly content. “It sure does look,” she spoke as ’Rome Ojeda would have spoken, “it sure does look like he’s gentled us both!”
Presently, when girl and beast were breathing normally again, she led him back to the point where she had left the trail, and Pedro made his one valuable contribution to the expedition by whinnying loudly and guiding them up.