 | The Wife of Chino |  |
V
THE TRAIL
THE night was black dark under the redwoods, so impenetrable that he could not see his horse's head, and braced even as he was for greater perils, it required all his courage to ride top speed at this vast slab of black that like a wall he seemed to charge head down with every leap of his bronco's hoofs.
For the first half-hour the trail mounted steadily, then, by the old gravel-pits, it topped the divide and swung down over more open slopes, covered only with chaparral and second growths. Here it was lighter, and Lockwood uttered a fervent "Thank God!" when, a few moments later, the moon shouldered over the mountain crests ahead of him and melted the black shadows to silver-gray. Beyond the gravelpits the trail turned and followed the flank of the slope, level here for nearly a mile. Lockwood set his teeth against the agony of his foot and gave the bronco the quirt with all his strength.
In another half-hour he had passed Cold Cañon, and twenty minutes after that had begun the descent into Indian River. He forded the river at a gallop, and, with the water dripping from his very hatbrim, drove laboring up the farther slope.
Then he drew rein with a cry of bewilderment and apprehension. The lights of Iowa Hill were not two hundred yards distant. He had covered the whole distance from the mine, and where was Chino?
There was but one answer: back there along the trail somewhere, at some point by which Lockwood had galloped head-long and unheeding, lying up there in the chaparral with Reno's bullets in his body.
There was no time now to go on to the Hill. Chino, if he was not past help, needed it without an instant's loss of time. Lockwood spun the horse about. Once more the ford, once more the cañon slopes, once more the sharp turn by Cold Cañon, once more the thick darkness under the redwoods. Steadily he galloped on, searching the roadside.
Then all at once he reined in sharply, bringing the horse to a standstill, one ear turned down the wind. The night's silence was broken by a multitude of sounds—the labored breathing of the spent bronco, the saddle creaking as the dripping flanks rose and fell, the touch of wind in the treetops, and the chorusing of the myriad tree-toads. But through all these, distinct, as precise as a clock-tick, Lockwood had heard, and yet distinguished, the click of a horse's hoof drawing near, and the horse was at a gallop: Reno at last.
Lockwood drew his pistol. He stood in thick shadow. Only some twenty yards in front of him was there any faintest break in the darkness; but at that point the blurred moonlight made a grayness across the trail, just a tone less deep than the redwoods' shadows.
With his revolver cocked and trained
The gallop came blundering on, sounding in the night's silence as loud as the passage of an express-train; and the echo of it, flung back from the cañon-side, confused it and distorted it till, to Lockwood's morbid alertness, it seemed fraught with all the madness of flight, all the hurry of desperation.
Then the hoof-beats rose to a roar, and a shadow just darker than the darkness heaved against the grayness that Lockwood held covered with his pistol. Instantly he shouted aloud:
"Halt! Throw up your hands!"
His answer was a pistol-shot.
He dug his heel to his horse, firing as the animal leaped forward. The horses crashed together, rearing, plunging, and Lockwood, as he felt the body of a man crush by him on the trail, clutched into the clothes of him, and, with the pistol pressed against the very flesh, fired again, crying out as he did so:
"Drop your gun, Reno! I know you. I'll kill you if you move again."
And then it was that a wail rose into the night, a wail of agony and mortal apprehension:
"Señor Lockwude, Señor Lockwude, for the love of God, don't shoot! 'Tis I— Chino Zavalla."
| The Wife of Chino | |