“Get the reins!” yelled Justin; “we’d best be out of here.”
The team broke into a dead run. Looking back, Justin saw the cloud ominously, frightfully near. A struggling advance-guard of long-horns heaved out before, and ahead of them were two men, riding like demons, yet ever beating backward as they rode. Then the red veil fell, and there was nothing but a dust-cloud, rolling on nearer and nearer.
When the Englishmen were gone, Belle looked after their retreating wagon, and sighed. She was just realizing, now that the week was past and these clean, courteous, easy-moving beings of another world were gone, that she had been dreaming dreams. Emilio looked also, sometimes after the wagon, sometimes after the girl. When he bent his gaze on Belle he was serious enough, but when his eye ran down the track of bloody dots, he drew his lips back from his white teeth, and smiled. He was holding the reins of his roan bronco; he dropped them to lean over the fence, and looked up the road, away from the wagon.
“What is it that you see up there?” she asked, carelessly, in Spanish.
“Something that your white-haired friend will be glad to see,” he answered. She looked, saw the dust-cloud coming, saw the little, caking pool of blood, and went white in a moment.
“That,” she cried, “that is what your antelope meant! You knew that cattle were coming this way to-day.”
“A thousand head passing up to the White River country. And wild, very wild.”
“They will trample them; kill them!”
“You thought about that when you kissed him,” he sneered; “the blood goes straight, and the wind is right. He will have a run for it—your lover.”