Page:J Allan Dunn--The Girl of Ghost Mountain.djvu/122

104 more of the punishment they intended to inflict than this would reveal. They would want to see their victim cringe as the hot tar smeared his naked flesh, to see to strike as he ran the ruthless gauntlet down into the desert that would receive him as a horrible travesty of man and desiccate him to the semblance of a mummied bird.

Here was no group that could be cajoled by the ways of a woman, by a tune on a fiddle, doughnuts and a whistled aria. A Chinaman was fair game. Hollister would be leader of a crowd inhuman in their desire to torture, to hurt, to send a half-crazed screaming thing that had been a man to a loathsome death. And Metzal, while it might not universally approve, would be apathetic, would neither interfere nor punish. The feat would restore Hollister to that bullying supremacy that he loved and had lost.

The horses had made forty miles that day. They had rested well between stretches but they were tired and the clogging dust of the mesa pulled at their strength. Sheridan did not dare to gaze at the east. The full moon would throw glints and shadows soon enough to apprise him if his trip was a lost venture—a thought intolerable. That this was aimed at him, through Quong, he knew and cared not as he cheered the mare, responding to the last ounce of game vitality, dropping from springless lope to walk, back to dreary trot and so to walk again, almost played out, but indomitable to answer the will of her master. Beside her toiled the pinto. Both horses, both men, were grey with dust, grey as the whole landscape.