Oh, I hope they can
make it!"
"We can go on a-foot if they can't," reassured the man. "It is not
far."
The horses pushed on with renewed life. They stumbled weakly, but the
hopeless, lack-lustre look was gone from their eyes and at frequent
intervals they stretched their quivering nostrils toward the long green
line in the distance. So slow was their laboured pace that at the end
of a half-hour Endicott dismounted and walked, hobbling clumsily over
the hot rocks and through ankle-deep drifts of dust in his high-heeled
boots. A buzzard rose from the coulee ahead with silent flapping of
wings, to be joined a moment later by two more of his evil ilk, and the
three wheeled in wide circles above the spot from which they had been
frightened. A bend in the coulee revealed a stagnant poison spring. A
dead horse lay beside it with his head buried to the ears in the slimy
water. Alice glanced at the broken chain of the hobbles that still
encircled the horse's feet.
"It's the pack-horse!" she cried. "They have only one horse between
them!"
"Yes, he got away in the night." Endicott nodded. "Bat is hunting
water, and Tex is waiting." He carried water in his hat and dashed it
over the heads of the horses, and sponged out their mouths and noses as
Tex and Bat had done. The drooping animals revived wonderfully under
the treatment and, with the long green line of scrub timber now plainly
in sight, evinced an eagerness for the trail that, since the departure
from Antelope Butte, had been entirely wanting.
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