They sprang toward me. Brent followed the line with his eye. He galloped forward, with a look of triumph.
Suddenly I saw him fling himself half out of his saddle, and clutch at some object. Still going at speed, and holding on by one leg alone, after the Indian fashion for sport or shelter against an arrow or a shot, he picked up something from the bushes, regained his seat, and waved his treasure to us. We ranged up and rode beside him over a gap in the sage.
A lady’s glove!—that was what he had stooped to recover. An old buckskin riding gauntlet, neatly stitched about the wrist, and pinked on the wristlet. A pretty glove, strangely, almost tragically, feminine in this desolation. A well-worn glove, that had seen better days, like its mistress, but never any day so good as this, when it proved to us that we were on the sure path of rescue.
“I take up the gauntlet,” said Brent. “Gare a qui le touche!”
We said nothing more; for this unconscious token, this silent cry for help, made the danger seem more closely imminent. We pressed on. No flinching in any of the horses. Where we could, we were going at speed. Where they could, the horses kept side by side, nerving each other. Companionship sustained them in that terrible ride.
And now in front the purple Sierra was growing brown, and rising up a distinct wall, cleft visibly with dell, gully, ravine, and cañon. The saw-teeth of the ridge defined themselves sharply into peak and pinnacle. Broad fields of cool snow gleamed upon the summits.
We were ascending now all the time into subalpine regions. We crossed great sloping savannas, deep in dry, rustling grass, where a nation of cattle might pasture. We plunged through broad wastes of hot sand. We flung ourselves down and up the red sides of water-worn gullies. We took breakneck leaps across dry quebradas in the clay. We clattered across stony arroyos, longing thirstily for the gush of water that had flowed there not many months before.
The trail was everywhere plain. No prairie craft was needed to trace it. Here the chase had gone, but a few hours ago; here, across grassy slopes, trampling the grass as if a mower had passed that way; here, ploughing wearily through the sand; here, treading the red, crumbling clay; here, breaking down the side of a bank; here, leaving a sharp hoof-track in the dry mud of a fled torrent. Everywhere a straight path, pointing for that deepening gap in the Sierra, Luggernel Alley, the only gate of escape.
Brent’s unerring judgment had divined the course aright. On he led, charging along the trail, as if he were trampling already on the carcasses of the pursued. On he led and we followed, drawing nearer, nearer to our goal.
Our horses suffered bitterly for water. Some five hours we had ridden without a pause. Not one drop or sign of water in all that arid waste. The torrents had poured along the dry water-courses too hastily to let the scanty alders and willows along their line treasure up any sap of growth. The wild-sage bushes had plainly never tasted fluid more plenteous than seldom dewdrops doled out on certain rare festal days, enough to keep their meagre foliage a dusty gray. No pleasant streamlet lurked anywhere under the long dry grass of the savannas. The arroyos were parched and hot as rifts in lava.