Van was replacing the blindfold on the broncho’s eyes.  The animal was panting, sweating, quivering in every muscle.  His ears went backward and forward rapidly.  The blindfold shut out a wild, unreasoning challenge and defiance that burned like a torch in his eyes.

Algy came running with a big bottle, filled and corked.

“Fer God’s sake, leave me kill him!” Gettysburg was repeating automatically.  “Van, if you ain’t got no respect fer yourself, ain’t you got none left fer us old doggone cusses?”

“Give me the bottle, Algy,” Van replied.  “You’re the only game sport on the ranch.”

Still he did not discover Beth.  His attentions were engrossed by the horse.  He was dizzy, dazed, but a dogged master still of his forces.  Up he mounted to the saddle again, the bottle held firmly in his grasp.

“Slip off the blinder,” he said to his friends, and Algy it was who obeyed.

“Damn you, now you buck!” cried Van wildly, and his heels ignited the volcano.

For five solid minutes the broncho redoubled his scheme of demoniac fury.  Then he poised, let out a shrill scream of challenge, and abruptly raised to repeat the backward fall.

Up, up he went, an ungainly sight, and then—­the heavens split in twain.

He was only well lifted from the earth when, with a thunderous, terrible blow, Van crashed the bottle downward, fairly between his ears, and burst it on his skull.

The weapon was shattered with a frightening thud.  Red pieces of glass and streaming water poured in a cataract down across the broncho’s eyes as if very doom itself had suddenly cracked.  A cataclysm could not have been more horrible.  An indescribable fright and awe overwhelmed the brutish mind as with a cloud of lead.

Down swiftly he dropped to his proper position, perhaps with a fear that his crown was gaping open from impact with the sky.  He was stunned by the blow upon his brain, and weakened in every fiber.  He started to run, in terror of the thing, and the being still solid in the saddle.  Wildly he went around the cove, in the panic of utter defeat.

The men began to cheer, their voices choked and hoarse.  Van rode now as fate might ride the very devil.  He spurred the horse to furious, exhausting speed, guiding him wildly around the mountain theater.  Again and again they circled the grassy arena, till foam and lather whitened the broncho’s flank, chest, and mouth, and his nostril burned red as living flame.

When at last the animal, weary and undone, would have sobered down to a trot or walk, Van forced him anew to crazy speed.  At least five miles he drove him thus, till the broncho’s sides, like the rider’s face, were red with blood mingled with sweat.

Beth, at the climax, had gone down suddenly, leaning against the tree.  She had not fainted, but was far too weak to stand.  Her eyes only moved.  She watched the two, that seemed welded into one, go racing madly against fatigue.