Page:Edison Marshall--Shepherds of the wild.djvu/272

264 Yet the crackle behind him got on his nerves, and he struck his horse again.

And this second blow was a serious mistake. The horse was already running at a swift pace down the narrow trail. There is a limit to the speed a horse can run with safety in the Idaho mountains, and that limit was already reached. Beyond that point comes only panic and blind frenzy. The horse leaped forward to the wildest pace it knew.

The sweat leaped from Fargo's dark brow, and slowly his self-mastery came back to him. There was no need of this wild flight. He had plenty of time. He started to check the horse.

But at that instant the sinister forces of the wild—always lurking in ambush for such as Fargo—saw their chance. And the forest-demons do not need mighty weapons. Their agents are the Little Things, the covert trivialities that few men notice. In this case the resistless force that overwhelmed him was only a furry, half-blind creature of the dust—a rodent such as ordinarily Fargo would press his heel upon and crush.

The rodent had been enlarging his winter home, and he had dug away some of the earth from under the trail. The horse was running too wildly to be careful, his hoof broke through the little shelf of dirt, and he tripped and hurled headlong.

To the rodent, the disaster meant further