He obeyed quickly. They were going faster each moment. Just below them was a small thicket of pinons, and, unless their speed increased, there might be a chance to slide into that thicket of small trees.
Another bullet snapped past them, and the tip of a pinon was severed. Rex glanced back, trying to see the grade, but the angle was too abrupt. He could see their trail, where the sifting gravel was following them. Then a branch lashed him across the face, a pinon trunk sent him spinning sideways, and he was through the thicket. His eyes were filled with sand and tears, but he saw Nan a short distance behind him. She had a pinon limb in her hands, which had torn off, when she tried to stop.
Up to this point the sliding had not been painful, as it was loose gravel, which, instead of their sliding over it, seemed to go along with them. There was no more shooting now. Rex managed to slow up sufficiently to half-stand, and then to run sideways across the slope to where he could reach Nan.
Her hands were torn from the pinon branches, and there was a welt across her cheek. She was slightly dazed and hardly realized, for a moment, that their slide was over.
‘What happened?’ she asked foolishly.
‘I don’t know,’ said Rex, clinging with toes and hands to the loose surface, in order to look back up the slope.
They had managed to stop at the edge of a sheer place. Something was coming down the hill toward them. Rex saw it tear through the little thicket above them, fairly knocking down the trees. It was going to pass them at about twenty feet, and, as it came down past them, in a cloud of dust and sand, they saw it shoot over the edge just below them and go hurtling off into space.
‘That is my huh-horse!’ blurted Rex.
Nan nodded, her lips shut tight.
‘How do you suppose it got off the road, Nan?’