“Good God!” cried Hare.  “They’re firing on us!  They’d shoot a woman!”

“Has it taken you so long to learn that?”

Hare slashed his steed with the switch.  But Silvermane needed no goad or spur; he had been shot at before, and the whistle of one bullet was sufficient to stretch his gallop into a run.  Then distance between him and his pursuers grew wider and wider and soon he was out of range.  The yells of the rustlers seemed at first to come from baffled rage, but Mescal’s startled cry shoveled their meaning.  Other horsemen appeared ahead and to the right of him, tearing down the ridge to the divide.  Evidently they had been returning from the western curve of Coconina.

The direction in which Silvermane was stretching was the only possible one for Hare.  If he swerved off the trail to the left it would be upon rough rising ground.  Not only must he outride this second band to the point where the trail went down on the other side of the divide, but also he must get beyond it before they came within rifle range.

“Now!  Silver!  Go!  Go!” Fast as the noble stallion was speeding he answered to the call.  He was in the open now, free of stones and brush, with the spang of rifles in the air.  The wind rushed into Hare’s ears, filling them with a hollow roar; the ground blurred by in reddish sheets.  The horsemen cut down the half mile to a quarter, lessened that, swept closer and closer, till Hare recognized Chance and Culver, and Snap Naab on his cream-colored pinto.  Seeing that they could not head the invincible stallion they sheered more to the right.  But Silvermane thundered on, crossing the line ahead of them a full three hundred yards, and went over the divide, drawing them in behind him.

Then, at the sharp crack of the rifles, leaden messengers whizzed high in the air over horse and riders, and skipped along the red shale in front of the running dog.

“Oh—­Silvermane!” cried Hare.  It was just a call, as if the horse were human, and knew what that pace meant to his master.  The stern business of the race had ceased to rest on Hare.  Silvermane was out to the front!  He was like a level-rushing thunderbolt.  Hare felt the instantaneous pause between his long low leaps, the gather of mighty muscles, the strain, the tension, then the quivering expulsion of force.  It was a perilous ride down that red slope, not so much from the hissing bullets as from the washes and gullies which Silvermane sailed over in magnificent leaps.  Hare thrilled with savage delight in the wonderful prowess of his desert king, in the primal instinct of joy at escaping with the woman he loved.

“Outrun!” he cried, with blazing eyes.  Mescal’s white face was pressed close to his shoulder.  “Silver has beaten them.  They’ll hang on till we reach the sand-strip, hoping the slow-down will let them come up in time.  But they’ll be far too late.”

The rustlers continued on the trail, firing desultorily, till Silvermane so far distanced them that even the necessary lapse into a walk in the red sand placed him beyond range when they arrived at the strip.