Elbert bent forward. ‘I say, Mamie, we’re off!’ She knew that tone—a wide-open throttle, it meant, and the big sorrel settled lower at the left, his fish eye fixed on her nose.
Now part of Elbert’s private reaction to the headlong pace was the sense that he had been fixing for this race all his life—a sort of climax of all days, and his eyes glanced often up to old Polaris, as if the north star were a silver cup for the winner. A distance-course, seconds pounding on into minutes, the minutes into tens, dusk of earliest morning blent with the low moon’s rays; only two horses in the finish, silence as deep from behind now as from the desolate foothills ahead—a friend to stick by at his left—white smile, two slits of black for eyes, body hanging forward.
Every little while: ‘Don’t fall, Bart! Give me a word if you’re slipping!’
‘I’m not going to fall, Mister—’
The river had narrowed to a creek; the road to a path; the blowing horses pelted forward on rising ground—
Then it was all as queer as a dream. Breaking day, a face framed in a dobe gateway, a face by the side of the road. Just a glimpse—girl or child or woman, he did not know—but a face in the ashen light—oval beauty in the gateway of a dobe wall! Elbert’s head flung back as they passed, but the face was gone. That instant thickly from Bart:
‘Pull up, pardner!’
Elbert’s hand went out to the left, as he drew Mamie sharply in with the other. The look of death was on Bart’s face; his lips moved.
‘Big town ahead—Fonseca—three miles or so. Rurales—they’ll be waitin’ for us there—’ The gamy head rocked back, the spine drooping sideways.
‘We’re not going there,’ said Elbert, leaping down. ‘God, how you’ve sat it out! You can fall now—I’m underneath!’