"But what are we going to do about it?" asked the lad, who, afire as he was with the excitement, had thought nothing of the difficulty that faced him. "Can we stop 'em?"
"We'll have a try, you bet," replied Walton, drawing his revolver, and twisting the cylinder to see that it was fully loaded.
The sound of the stampede was drawing nearer and nearer. The two in the bluff mounted their horses, and rode straight for it. There was only one man driving the herd. Ted easily recognized him as the foreman of the ranch. Every suspicion he had formed was fully founded.
Walton, as soon as the stampede came abreast, fired three shots from his revolver, hoping to check them. They half served the purpose, but there was a man urging them on who was worth more than a mere consideration. As soon as Hobson saw that his plan was known to others, bullets began to whistle round Ted's and the sheriff's heads at an alarming rate. One bullet caught the hindquarters of the boy's horse, inflicting a maddening, scorching wound that made the brute grip the bit fiercely in its teeth, swerve to the right, and bolt headlong, in spite of the lad's frantic efforts to check its flight. Another shot struck the leader of the herd of bronchos, not seriously wounding it, but driving it crazy with rage, pain, and fear. It, too, wheeled half about, and followed close on the lad's tracks, the whole herd stampeding after it. Shrill neighs filled the air, making it hideous with the tumult. More shots were fired between the sheriff and the foreman. Ted could not notice any of the events that were occurring near him. His whole attention was centred on his efforts to hold his animal in and maintain his seat.
Ted's horse was quite unmanageable. Straight ahead, never swerving, with a hundred more pounding behind him, man and horse rushed. It soon became apparent that it was more than a runaway for Ted; it was a race for life. Those fear-consumed, mad, unreasoning brutes behind him were heedless of the fact that a man was in front. Without heed of the direction in which he was going, the lad spurred his horse, hoping to keep safely ahead—not trying now to check its career. He knew that to turn aside was impossible. All he cared for was to keep ahead. And, in spite of the extra burden his beast was carrying, the pursuers gained nothing on him.
Fear filled the lad's heart. If it had been an ordinary death that threatened him, he would have faced it bravely enough; but the thought of being ground to death beneath the hoofs of those equine fiends behind him terrorized him until he almost lost sense of everything but his desire to escape.
It would have frightened any man. The weird shrieks, the bellows-like breathing of his own and of the other horses, the hollow, muffled, pounding of hoofs on the hard, sun-baked prairie, the whistle of the wind about his ears, all combined to make his brain reel. He thought nothing of what was ahead, until it was nearly too late.
Nearly—not quite!
He had a dim recollection of a feeling, a foreboding that all was not right in front. The pale glimmer of the moon made the earth appear as though it suddenly dropped away into nothingness. Like a flash it came home to him that he was close to the edge of Rushing Cañon, a great cleft, dropping to a depth of five hundred feet, sheer to the bottom, where a roaring torrent raged.
Something like a moan passed his lips. He felt himself wondering which would be the better death: to have the life stamped out of him, or to be dashed to pieces below.