“Horse hit?” snapped Perry Potter breathlessly.  “I knowed it.  Just like yuh.  Get onto this’n uh mine—­he’s the best in the bunch—­and light out—­if yuh still want t’ catch that train.”

I came back from the primitive with a rush.  I no longer wanted to kill and kill.  Dad was lying “critically ill” in Frisco—­and Frisco was a long way off!  The miles between bulked big and black before me, so that I shivered and forgot my quarrel with King.  I must catch that train.

I went with one leap up into the saddle as Perry Potter slid down, thought vaguely that I never could ride with the stirrups so short, but that there was not time to lengthen them; took my feet peevishly out of them altogether, and dashed down, that winding way between King’s sheds and corrals while the Ragged H boys kept King’s men at bay, and the unmusical medley of shots and yells followed us far in the darkness of the pass.  At the last fence, where we perforce drew rein to make a free passage for our horses, I looked back, like one Mrs. Lot.  A red glare lit the whole sky behind us with starry sparks, shooting up higher into the low-hanging crimson smoke-clouds.  I stared, uncomprehending for a moment; then the thought of her stabbed through my brain, and I felt a sudden horror.  “And Beryl’s back among those devils!” I cried aloud, as I pulled my horse around.

“Beryl”—­Frosty laid peculiar stress upon the name I had let slip—­“isn’t likely to be down among the sheds, where that fire is.  Our boys are collecting damages for Shylock, I guess; hope they make a good job of it.”

I felt silly enough just then to quarrel with my grandmother; I hate giving a man cause for thinking me a love-sick lobster, as I’d no doubt Frosty thought me.  I led my horse over the wires he had let down, and we went on without stopping to put them back on the posts.  It was some time before I spoke again, and, when I did, the subject was quite different; I was mourning because I hadn’t the Yellow Peril to eat up the miles with.

“What good would that do yuh?” Frosty asked, with a composure I could only call unfeeling.  “Yuh couldn’t get a train, anyway, before the one yuh will get; motors are all right, in their place—­but a horse isn’t to be despised, either.  I’d rather be stranded with a tired horse than a broken-down motor.”

I did not agree with him, partly because I was not at all pleased with my present mount, and partly because I was not in amiable mood; so we galloped along in sulky silence, while a washed-out moon sidled over our heads and dodged behind cloud-banks quite as if she were ashamed to be seen.  The coyotes got to yapping out somewhere in the dark, and, as we came among the breaks that border the Missouri, a gray wolf howled close at hand.