Page:RidersOfSilences - Max Brand.djvu/315

Rh. Then, except for the disfigured face and the bloodshot eyes, he was himself.

"Up there? What happened?"

He pointed up the valley.

"The girl and Pierre. They're together."

"She found him?"

"Yes."

He bowed his head and sighed.

"And the horse, Jack?" He said it with awe.

"I took the horse from McGurk."

"You!"

She nodded. After all, it was not a lie.

"You killed McGurk?"

She said coolly: "I let him go the way he let you, Dick. He's on foot in the mountains without a horse or a gun."

"It isn't possible!"

"There the horse for proof."

He looked at her as if she were something more than human.

"Our Jack — did this?"

"We've got to start on. Can you walk, Dick?"

"A thousand miles now."

Yet he staggered when he tried to rise, and she made him climb up to the saddle. The white horse walked on, and she kept her place close at the stirrup of the rider. He would have stopped and dismounted for her a hundred times, but she made him keep his place.

"What's ahead of us, Jack? We're the last of the gang?"

"The last of Boone's gang. We are."