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But I've been feeling lately that we're both skirting a cut-bank with our eyes blindfolded, and I've faced an incident, trivial in itself but momentous in its possibilities, which persuades me that things can't go on as they are.
The country ahead was a tangle of small flat-tops, crisscrossed by a network of badland washes and cut-bank draws, and for two miles he eluded the dog pack by sheer brainwork and cunning. But the hounds pressed him hard. Their speed was greater than his own and each time they lost sight of him they spread out both ways.
A glance at the situation revealed a dangerous predicament, as the swift water and the contour of the river held the animals on the farther side or under the cut-bank.
It was broad daylight when Bill called a halt, and after many unsuccessful attempts succeeded in kindling a sickly blaze in the shelter of a clay-streaked cut-bank. He unslung the pack which he had taken from the shoulders of the girl, and removed some bacon and sodden bannock.
Across the mouth of the funnel with its yawning deadly cut-bank, and down the side coulee, carrying part of the fence with them, the herd crashed onward, with the black horse hanging on their flank still biting and kicking with a kind of joyous fury. "Raven! Raven!" cried Cameron in glad accents. "It is Raven! Thank God, he is straight after all!"
Three times she felt the heaving plunge and jar as the little horse skimmed over cut-bank coulees and washes which her own eyes could not see in the dripping velvet black. From the sounds below she knew they were well up on the flanks of the run and nearing the peak. The stampede seemed slowing. A long, wavering flash revealed Harris a dozen jumps ahead.
The lay of the Beaver valley below headquarters was well known. The banks of the creek shifted from a valley on one side, to low, perpendicular bluffs on the other. It was in one of these meanderings of the stream that Joel saw a possible haven, the sheltering cut-bank that he hoped to reach, where refuge might be secured against the raging elements.
The three saddle animals stood hobbled with their heads close to the cut-bank, but the pack-horse was gone. "Maybe you'll find it," he muttered, "but the best bet is, you won't. I gave my horse his head for an hour before we camped, an' he couldn't find it." Tex sat up after that, with his back to the wall of the coulee. With the first hint of dawn Endicott joined him.
His brain was capable of only one thought pursuit; and he thanked his stars for the sure-footed beast under him. Nothing stopped her; she lifted to every obstruction. A cut-bank had no terrors for her, she simply charged it with her great, strong hoofs till the gravel and sand poured away under them and left her a foothold. Bushes were trampled down or plunged through.
Even Neifkins finally was convinced of that, and was about to admit as much when, without warning, wagon, driver and horses went over a cut-bank, where the animals lay on their backs, a kicking tangled mass. It was the end.
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