Faster
It came afternoon, as we rode on steadily. The country grew rougher. The horses never flinched, but they sweated freely, and foam from their nostrils flecked their shoulders. By and by, with little pleasant admonitory puffs, a breeze drew down from the glimmering frosty edges of the Sierra and cooled us. Horses and men were cheered and freshened, and lifted anew to their work.
We had seen and heard no life on the desert. Now in the broken country, a cayote or two scuttled away as we passed. Sometimes a lean gray wolf would skulk out of a brake, canter after us a little way, and then squat on his haunches, staring at our strange speed. Flight and chase he could understand, but ours was not flight for safety, or chase for food. Men are queer mysteries to beasts. So our next companions found. Over the edge of a slope, bending away to a valley of dry scanty pasture at the left, a herd of antelopes appeared. They were close to us, within easy revolver shot. They sprang into graceful flight, some score of them, with tails up and black hoofs glancing. Presently, pausing for curiosity, they saw that we fled, not followed, and they in turn became pursuers, careering after us for a mile or more, until our stern business left their gambolling play far behind.
We held steadily for that notch in the blue Sierra. The mountain lines grew sharper; the country where we travelled, rougher, every stride. We came upon a wide tract covered with wild-sage bushes. These delayed and baffled us. It was a pigmy forest of trees, mature and complete, but no higher than the knee. Every dwarfed, stunted, gnarled bush, had the trunk, limbs, twigs, and gray, withered foliage, all in miniature, of some tree, hapless but sturdy, that has had a weather-beaten struggle for life on a storm-threshed crag by the shore, or on a granite side of a mountain, with short allowance of soil to eat and water to drink. Myriads of square miles of that arid region have no important vegetation except this wild-sage, or Artemisia, and a meaner brother, not even good to burn, the greasewood.
One may ride through the tearing thickets of a forest primeval, as one may shoulder through a crowd of civilized barbarians at a spectacle. Our gallop over the top of this pigmy wood was as difficult as to find passage over the heads of the same crowd, tall men and short, men hatted with slouched hats, wash-bowls, and stove-pipes. It was a rough scramble. It checked our speed and chafed our horses. Sometimes we could find natural pathways for a few rods. Then these strayed aside or closed up, and we must plunge straight on. We lost time; moments we lost, more precious than if every one were marked by a drop in a clepsydra, and each drop as it fell changed itself and tinkled in the basin, a priceless pearl.
“It worries me, this delay,” I said to Brent.
“They lost as much — more time than we,” he said.
And he crowded on, more desperately, as a man rides for dearer than life, — as a lover rides for love.
We tore along, breaking through and over the sage-bushes, each man where best he could. Fulano began to show me what leaps were in him. I gave him his head. No bridle would have held him. I kept my mastery by the voice, or rather by the perfect identification of his will with mine. Our minds acted together. “Save strength,” I still warned him, “save strength, my friend, for the mountains and the last leaps!”
A little pathway in the sage-bushes suddenly opened before me, as a lane rifts in the press of hurrying legions ’mid the crush of a city thoroughfare. I dashed on a hundred yards in advance of my comrades.
What was this? The bushes trampled and broken down, just as we in our passage were trampling and breaking them. What?
Hoof-marks in the dust!
“The trail!” I cried, “the trail!”
They sprang toward me. Brent followed the line with his eye. He galloped forward, with a look of triumph.
Suddenly I saw him fling himself half out of his saddle, and clutch at some object. Still going at speed, and holding on by one leg alone, after the Indian fashion for sport or shelter against an arrow or a shot, he picked up something from the bushes, regained his seat, and waved his treasure to us. We ranged up and rode beside him over a gap in the sage.
A lady’s glove! — that was what he had stooped to recover. An old buckskin riding gauntlet, neatly stitched about the wrist, and pinked on the wristlet. A pretty glove, strangely, almost tragically, feminine in this desolation. A well-worn glove, that had seen better days, like its mistress, but never any day so good as this, when it proved to us that we were on the sure path of rescue.