And then, just as the bay struck the waters of Nameless with a leap and a roar, it seemed to Selwood that the heavens opened up, that all the fire in the universe flamed in his brain.
He swung far out to the left, a terrible lever of weight to the gallant animal floundering beneath him, and made the supreme physical effort of his life to get back into his saddle. His fingers dug into the wet mane like talons, he clawed desperately with his right heel and felt the spur hook.
For what reason he could not have said, he opened his mouth and screamed—a hoarse, wild sound, like the soul’s farewell to its flesh. Perhaps he thought it was.
Sud Provine, sitting his shivering horse where he had drawn it to a sliding stop on the trail above, deliberately shoved his gun into its saddle-straps.
“I guess that’s th’ last of you, my buckko,” he gritted, “that’s your last ride, damn you! See how you like th’ water.”
And he turned back up the slope.
At dawn McKane, who slept in the store at Cordova, heard something untoward. It was a rapping that seemed to come from the floor of the porch outside—an odd, irregular stroke, as if the hand that made it was uncertain.
He rose, drew on his pants and hooking his suspenders over his shoulders as he went, opened the front door.
A bay horse, gaunt and bedraggled, stood at the porch’s shoulder-high edge, and hanging half out of its saddle, held only by the right spur still caught in the hair cinch and one arm around the pommel, was the sheriff.
His ghastly face was red with blood from the long wound which had split his scalp from just above the left ear across the temple to the end of the eyebrow.