“Steady!” gasped Red Perris.  “They’re coming like bullets, Alcatraz, old timer!  Steady!”

One hand rested on the withers, the other on the back of the chestnut, and he raised himself gingerly up.  Under the weight the stallion shrank catwise, aside and down.  But there was no wrench of a curb in his mouth, no biting of the cinches.  In the old days of his colthood, a barelegged boy used to come into the pasture and jump on his bare back.  His mind flashed back to that—­the bare, brown legs.  That was before he had learned that men ride with leather and steel.  He waited, holding himself strongly on leash, ready to turn loose his whole assortment of tricks—­but Perris slipped into place almost as lightly as that dimly remembered boy in the pasture.

To the side, that line of rushing riders was yelling and waving hats.  And now the light winked and glimmered on naked guns.

“Go!” whispered Perris at his ear.  “Alcatraz!”

And the flat of his hand slapped the stallion on the flank.  Was not that the old signal out of the pasture days, calling for a gallop?

He started into a swinging canter.  And a faint, half-choked cry of pleasure from the lips of his rider tingled in his ears.  For your born horseman reads his horse by the first buoyant moment, and what Red Jim Perris read of the stallion surpassed his fondest dreams.  A yell of wonder rose from Hervey and his charging troop.  They had seen Red Jim come battered and exhausted from his struggle with the stallion the day before, and now he sat upon the bareback of the chestnut—­a miracle!

“Shoot!” yelled Hervey.  “Shoot for the man.  You can’t hit the damned hoss!”

In answer, a volley blazed, but what they had seen was too much for the nerves of even those hardy hunters and expert shots.  The volley sang about the ears of Perris, but he was unscathed, while he felt Alcatraz gather beneath him and sweep into a racing pace, his ears flat, his neck extended.  For he knew the meaning of that crashing fire.  Fool that he had been not to guess.  He who had battled with him the day before, but battled without man’s ordinary tools of torture; he who had saved him this very day from certain death in the water; this fellow of the flaming red hair, was in truth so different from other men, that they hunted him, they hated him, and therefore they were sending their waspish and invisible messengers of death after him.  For his own safety, for the life of the man on his back, Alcatraz gave up his full speed.

And Perris bowed low along the stallion’s neck and cheered him on.  It was incredible, this thing that was happening.  They had reached top speed, and yet the speed still increased.  The chestnut seemed to settle towards the earth as his stride lengthened.  He was not galloping.  He was pouring himself over the ground with an endless succession of smooth impulses.  The wind of that running became a gale.  The blown mane of Alcatraz whipped and cut at the face of Perris, and still the chestnut drove swifter and swifter.