Locked together they passed the post, the buckskin's neck in front. Their speed had been checked; in a dozen yards they were stopped, and the boy pitched headlong from the buckskin's back, one foot still tangled in the martingale of Horned Toad.
Men closed in frantically. A man—it was Oregon—twisted Carney's gun skyward crying: "Leave that coyote to the boys."
He was right. In vain Iron Jaw and Death-on-the-trail sought to battle back the tense-faced men who reached for Texas. Iron Jaw and Death-on-the-trail were swallowed up in a seething mass of clamoring devils. Gun play was out of the question: humans were like herrings packed in a barrel.
Major Cummings, cool and quick-witted, had called shrilly "Troopers!" and a little cordon of men in cavalry uniform had Texas in the centre of a guarding circle.
Carney, on his knees beside the boy, was guarding the lad from the mad, trampling, fighting men; striking with the butt of his pistol. And then a woman's shrill voice rose clear above the tumult, crying:
"Back, you cowards—you brutes: the boy is dying: give him room—give him air!"
Her bleached hair was down her back; her silk finery was torn like a battered flag; for she had fought her way through the crowd to the boy's side.
"Don't lift him—he's got a hemorrhage!" she shrilled, as Carney put his arms beneath the little lad. "Drive the men back—give him air!" she commanded; and turned Billy flat on his back, tearing from her shoulders a rich scarf to place beneath his head. The lad's lips, coated with red froth, twitched in a weak smile; he reached out a thin hand, and Molly, sitting at his head, drew it into her lap.
"Just lie still, Billy. You'll be all right, boy; just lie still; don't speak," she admonished.
She could hear the lad's throat click, click, click at each breath, the ominous tick tick, of "the bug's" work; and at each half-stifled cough the red-tinged yeasty sputum bubbled up from the life well.