Page:Frederick Faust--Free Range Lanning.djvu/217

Rh across the river bottom and having formed so that no tricky doubling could leave them in the lurch on a blind trail, they began to use a new set of tactics. It was new to Hal Dozier, but it was the old trick of his dead brother.

Dozier kept Gray Peter at a steady pace, never varying his gait. But, on either side of him groups of his followers urged their horses forward at breakneck speed. Three or four would send home the spurs and rush up the river bottom after Andrew. If he did not hurry on they opened fire with their rifles from a short distance and sent a hail of random bullets, but Andrew knew that a random bullet carries just as much force as a well-aimed one, and chance might be on the side of one of those shots. He dared not allow them to come too close. Yet his heart rejoiced as he watched the manner in which Sally accepted these challenges. She never once had to lurch into her racing gait; she took the rushes of the cow ponies behind her by merely lengthening her stride until she seemed to be settling closer and closer to the ground, and always the horses behind her were winded and had to fall back.

Yet they included some fine strains of blood in that bunch; only there was lacking the difference between a good animal and a fine one, in addition to the fact that Sally was long since hardened to just such races as this one.

If Andrew had let out Sally she would have walked away from them all, but he dared not do that. For, after he had run the heart out of the commoner ones, there remained Gray Peter in reserve, never changing his pace, never hurrying, falling often far back, as the groups one after another pushed close to Sally and made her spurt, gaining again when the spurts ended one by one.