tant, and galloped a short distance
along the crest, neighing again, and then paused like an expectant dog,
with one forefoot raised, a white-stockinged forefoot. Marianne gripped
the glass hard and then dropped it. By the liquid smoothness of that
gallop, by the white-stockinged forefoot, by something about his head,
and above all by what she knew of his cunning, she had recognized
Alcatraz. And where, in the first glimpse, she had been about to warn
the men not to shoot this peerless beauty, she now dropped the glass
with the memory of the trampling of Manuel Cordova rushing back across
her mind.

"It's Alcatraz!" she cried. "It's that chestnut I told you of at
Glosterville, Mr. Hervey. Oh, shoot and shoot to kill. He's a murderer--
not a horse!"

That injunction was not needed. The rifle spoke from the shoulder of
Shorty, but the stallion neither fell nor fled, and his challenging
neigh rang faintly down to them.

"Mind the mares!" shrilled Marianne suddenly. "They're starting for
him!!"

In fact, it seemed as though the report of the rifle had started the
Coles horses towards their late companion They went forward at a
high-stepping trot as horses will when their minds are not quite made up
about their course. Now, in obedience to shouted orders from Hervey, the
cowpunchers split into two groups and slipped away on either side to
head the truants; Marianne herself, spurring as hard as she could after
Hervey, heard the foreman groaning: "By God, d'you ever _see_ a hoss
stand up under gunfire like that?"

For as they galloped, the men were pumping in shot after shot wildly,
and Alcatraz did not stir! The firing merely served to rouse the mares
from trot to gallop, and from gallop to run. For the first time Marianne
mourned their speed. They glided away as though the horses of the
cowpunchers were running fetlock deep in mud; they shot up the slope
towards the distant stallion like six bright arrows.

Then came Hervey's last, despairing effort: "Pull up! Shorty! Slim! Pull
up and try to drop that devil!"

They obeyed; Marianne, racing blindly ahead, heard a clanguor of shots
behind her and riveted her eyes on the chestnut, waiting for him to
fall. But he did not fall. He seemed to challenge the bullets with his
lordly head and in another moment he was wheeling with the mares about
him. Even in her anguish, Marianne noted with a thrill of wonder that
though the Coles horses were racing at the top of their speed