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He seized the square tobacco boxes, originally made to hold a pound of "plug cut," and afterwards dedicated to whatever use a ranch man might choose to put them. Where schools flourished, the tobacco boxes were used for lunch. The Swedes carried three tied in flour sacks and fastened to the saddles. The wind carried them at a run to the corral.
Huge saddles, studded with nails and fitted with cloth that served as blankets to the shoulders of the cattle, supported four high, square-topped turrets, through which the stout reins led from the mouths of the horses to the hands of the driver, who was a negro, of apparently twenty years of age.
A warning instinct caused him to urge his own horse forward, just as four riders came into view. He saw that the men in the saddles, who were forty or fifty yards away, were mountaineers, like Skelly. They wore fur caps; heavy blanket shawls were drooped about their shoulders and every one carried a rifle. As soon as they saw the boy they shouted to him to halt. Harry's alert senses took alarm.
Injured men, shot from their saddles, were seeking to crawl out of the way. Whirling eddies of smoke alternately hid and disclosed enemies, and from both left and right came the continuous and deafening crash of infantry in battle. But Forrest's men paused only a moment or two.
In a few seconds' time, three ponchos for each possesses one are snatched from the cantles of their saddles, and as speedily spread across the entrance of the cave just covering it, with not an inch to spare.
Fortunately the great pack saddles were a protection, and they emerged on the other side with both salt and powder dry. When the night was thickest, in the long, dark hour just before the dawn, Henry and Paul, who were again side by side, heard a faint, distant cry. It was a low, wailing note that was not unpleasant, softened by the spaces over which it came.
Leading the animals quietly some distance away, he gave the bridle of one to Chester. Quickly both lads leaped to the saddles. Chester now passed one of the weapons he had taken from Captain Eberhardt to Hal, and, grasping a bridle in one hand and a revolver in the other, the lads urged their mounts silently forward. They passed close to several bodies of moving troops, but were not challenged.
The well-stocked saddle-bags, which Buck's forethought had filled for the long trail, now provided these lonely wanderers in the wilderness with the food they needed, the saddle-blankets and the saddles furnished their open-air couches, and the horses, well, the horses were there to afford them escape when the time came, and, in the meantime, could be left to recover from the effects of the storm and stress through which they, too, had passed.
Their sleet of bullets emptied a hundred saddles, and slipping in the cartridges they fired again at close range. The cavalry charge seemed to stop dead in its tracks, and in an instant a scene of terrible confusion occurred. Wounded horses screaming in pain rushed wildly back upon their own comrades or through the ranks of the foe.
"Something's coming!" shouted Feeny, excitedly. "They see or hear somebody, sure. Look, Mr. Harvey, ain't that two of their fellows scudding away westward out there?" Surely enough. In the glare of the burning sheds the besieged caught a glimpse of two of the gang bending low in their saddles a hundred yards away and scudding like hounds over towards the open plain. "Is it rescue?
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