In the
morning we would come back and bury him, but for that night--well, he
was beyond any man's power to aid or injure, lying there alone in the
dark.
CHAPTER V.
MOUNTED AGAIN.
We stumbled along, close up, for the thick-piled clouds still hung their
light-obscuring banners over the sky. Three yards apart we became
invisible to each other. I followed behind MacRae more or less
mechanically, though I was, in a way, acutely conscious of the necessity
for stealthy going, one part of my mind busy turning over the quick
march of events and guessing haphazard at the future.
Striding along in this mental semi-detachment from the business in hand,
some three hundred yards down the coulee I tripped over a fallen
cottonwood and drove the point of a projecting limb clean through the
upper of my boot and into the calf of my leg--not a disabling wound, but
one that lacked nothing in the way of pain. The others stopped while I
pulled out the snag, which had broken off the trunk, and while I was
about this a familiar clattering noise uprose near-by. Ever hear a horse
shake himself, like a water-spaniel fresh from a dip, when he has been
tied for a long time in one place with the dead weight of a heavy stock
saddle on his back? There is a little by-play of grunting and clearing
of nostrils, then the slap of skirts and strings and stirrup-leathers--a
man never forgets or mistakes the sound of it, if he has ever slept in a
round-up camp with a dozen restless night-horses saddled and tied to a
wagon twenty feet from his bed.
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