It was a calamity of the first water. What was the use of riding to Jess Dreer if they brought his deadliest enemy in their wake? One hope remained, and that was to distance the sheriff and reach Jess far enough ahead to allow him to escape.
So they gave their minds grimly to their work.
They had not even time to talk, save a broken phrase here and there, but as the ride continued, she gathered the full details of the plan of the Norman clan against Dreer.
Gus Norman was to ride ahead of the rest and go straight to Dreer. There he would interview the outlaw and take him to a shack which he knew in the hills near Windville. Mary learned the location of the place by heart from Joe, who had heard Gus go over its description a dozen times to a dozen different members of the gang. He would take Jess Dreer to this ruined old cabin as to a rendezvous.
Then he would leave the outlaw there and go to meet the others under pretense of calling in the members of the crew who were to take part in the fake robbery.
The moment Gus had joined the others, they would swing down around the cabin and open a plunging fire from the rocks above. If, as was apt to be the case, they did not kill Dreer at the first discharge, they would, nevertheless, have him in an utterly helpless position. At worst, they could easily set the cabin on fire and kill the outlaw as he attempted to flee from the cover. To make his escape entirely impossible, the first discharge would be chiefly directed against the roan mare, Angelina. On foot, Dreer's chances of a dash for liberty would be less than zero.
Mary did not hear this story in one fluent narrative, but an interrupted series of explanations, exclamations, and phrases here and there gave her ample groundwork on which to build the complete picture of the plot.
Sometimes, as her hatred of the whole clan of Normans swelled in her, she felt like snatching a revolver from the holsters and firing it into the breast of the man beside her. Sometimes a great wonder grew in her that out of the very list of Dreer's enemies had been furnished the man who gave life to this wan ghost of a last hope.
Now the labor of the ride cut off the very possibility of thought from her mind.
They had struck what Joe assured her was the longest and most severe of the hillsides that they would encounter on the entire ride. It led up to a dangerous slope beyond, generally called The Slide, on account of the precipitous angle of the drop of ground. And now Joe Norman, who had been a weight upon her spirits in the beginning, was rapidly reviving.
He began to throw out hopes. Never, even in daylight, had he ever heard of such a distance through the hills being covered in such a short space of time. To be sure, the hardest part of the ride lay before them, and they would have to take it with horses completely fagged, but, nevertheless, there was the glimmering of the first dawn of hope. It might be done. Half the night was spent, but the other half, before that fatal time of an hour past dawn, they might reach the shack and give the warning to Jess Dreer.
He told her this while the horses sweated and grunted up the long rise. Once, on a shoulder of the slope, they paused by mutual consent to give the animals a breathing space.
Then, far and dim below, they heard the horse of the pursuer coming up the slope.
At this, they hurried on, the mustang now showing a condition fully as good as that of Gray Tom; but when they came out on the brow on the crest, Joe Norman stopped the girl with a yell of alarm.
The face of the hill was dished away. It had literally disappeared, and the head of Gray Tom was hanging over an abyss.
“A landslide!” groaned Joe Norman.
By the moonlight they could make it out plainly now. First there was a straight fall of cliff for a dizzy distance. Below this an apron of debris was spread, covered with what seemed to be stubble in the distance, but what they knew to be the splintered hulks of trees.
Even as they stood, their horses side by side, looking at one another in utter despair, the ground quivered beneath them. They were barely able to spur onto firmer ground when the entire table where they had stood before gave way, shuddered, yawned wide, and a thundering avalanche rushed down the slope.
The noise of the fall died away. A thick silence fell. Then the echo from the far hillside picked up the noise and sent it rumbling and rushing back at them, as if the landslide had roused some monster in the valley and made it roar defiance. When that echo died away, they could hear another sound distinctly from the hillside behind them—the noise of the pursuer following up the slope. He would be upon them in a moment.
“Quick, Joe!” pleaded the girl. “What can we do?”
“They's only one way out,” said Joe Norman sullenly, “and that's to go back. We've had our work for nothing.”
“I tell you, there has to be a way!”
“None in the world. Straight yonder—there's the direction for us. But we'll never get there.”
She swung her horse around with a cry of grief and impatience and rode him along the ridge, desperately close to the edge of the landslide. Her shout brought Norman beside her. She was pointing down through the moonlight.
“Don't you think if we put our horses back on their haunches, they'd go down that sliding all the way to the bottom?”
He looked over, and shuddered as he craned his head to look, for she was much nearer the edge on Gray Tom than he had dared to ride.
At this place the landslide had not ripped away the soil to the sheer face of the rock. There was no right-angle face of stone, but a skirting of the raw dirt came up to the edge of the ridge and swept away down to the floor of the gulley at a dizzy angle. Halfway down, it veered out toward a more generous angle.
“Mary,” he said, lifting his head, “you got a pile of courage even to think of it. I'll tell you what. It'd be just the same as jumping a hoss over a cliff. Except that a cliff would kill him a little quicker.”
“No kind of luck could save us, Mary. Plain suicide. Suppose a hoss could keep upright sliding down, he wouldn't be able to pick his way. All he could do would be to sit back on his haunches and slide. And if he struck a big rock or a tree stump—or anything to knock him over—why, he'd keep right on rolling over and over till he hit the bottom with a smash. He'd be dead long before that, and his rider would just be a red smear trailing out behind him.”
The moonlight somehow helped to paint the picture vividly. She saw herself on Gray Tom shooting down the slope—the rock lifting suddenly out of the moon haze—the crash, the toppling of the horse upon his side—and then death.
Then she heard the noise of the pursuer coming up the slope, terribly near now. Fear of something behind, unknown, balanced the fear of what lay before her.
“Joe,” she cried, “good-by. I'm going.”
He flung himself from the mustang and strove to reach the head of Gray Tom, but she had swung the stallion straight out to the edge of the ridge, and as Joe sprang forward, he saw the ground tremble, quake, and sink down.
He whirled about; he was barely in time to spring back to solid ground, and when he looked again, Gray Tom, with a snort of terror, was plunging down the slope.
One thing favored Mary, and that was the very fall of the ground, for it launched her smoothly and slowly on the downward journey. The chief trouble was that the rush of earth and stones around him maddened Gray Tom. He tried to straighten and spring away from that senseless confusion, but the girl flung herself far back in the saddle, and throwing all her weight on the reins, managed to pry him back on his haunches—far back. He was almost sitting down. Then the impetus of the drop caught them, and they shot down.
The ridge was whipped away from behind them; she looked far ahead. The distance to the floor of the gulch seemed treble as far as it had been from the top of the ridge above her. Nor was the ground half as smooth as it had appeared, viewed at the close angle. There were patches of muddy clay; there were streaks of gravel which, when they struck them, sent a raging avalanche pouring before them.
But the danger was not in the speed of the slide. It lay in the projections which jagged up and back at them like shark teeth. The end of a tree stump jumped at them from the night. A ragged edge caught her shoulder and ripped the sleeve away to the wrist, and when this was past, she saw a certain doom before them in the form of a big rock. There was no dodging it, and it was far too bulky to sway away from. Chance entered there and saved them.
The slide had swerved on either side of the boulder, and Gray Tom, in turn, was swerved along the path of least resistance and whipped by the rock.
Now they struck the apron of more level going. It spread out flatter. Gray Tom had lurched to his feet and was going at a mad gallop, floundering through loose soil, rushing on so that the air sung in the ears of Mary Valentine, and then, how, she did not know, the floor of the gulch was flat before her and Gray Tom had drawn down to a rocking canter.
He was trembling like an aspen through all his bulk, but he was unhurt. Her own blood had turned to ice, but looking back to the sickening height, she saw a tiny figure gesticulating. Then exultation swept over Mary. Her blood ran warm again. If there had been a chance before, there was a double chance now.
She put the spurs to Gray Tom and rushed for the next hillside.
