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While I was watching them, the small garrison band began suddenly to play, and the smiling soldier faces clouded as they glanced around in questioning surprise. "Saint Guise!" ejaculated De Croix, uneasily; "it is the Dead March!" I marked the sudden look of terrified astonishment in Mademoiselle's eyes, and dropped my hand upon hers where it rested against the saddle-pommel.
The sight of it turned him cold and sick, his unoccupied hand gripping the saddle-pommel as though he would crush the leather. Yet he did not speak, for there was nothing to say. Between these two was a fact, grim, awful, unchangeable. Fronting it, words were meaningless, pitiable. He had never before known that she could ride, but he knew it now.
Jack Burns's pack-train was starting back light for Crater Lake, and Churchill was invited to a mule. Burns wanted to put the gripsack on another animal, but Churchill held on to it, carrying it on his saddle-pommel. But he dozed, and the grip persisted in dropping off the pommel, one side or the other, each time wakening him with a sickening start.
"I won't!" he cried, furiously; but I seized his bridle, swung his frightened horse, and struck the animal across the buttocks with clubbed rifle. Away tore the maddened beast, almost unseating his rider, who lost both stirrups at the first frantic bound and clung helplessly to his saddle-pommel while the horse carried him away like the wind.
"I have seen too much of thy skill, sage Hakim," said Sir Kenneth, "to debate thine hest;" and swallowed the narcotic, mingled as it was with some water from the spring, then wrapped him in the haik, or Arab cloak, which had been fastened to his saddle-pommel, and, according to the directions of the physician, stretched himself at ease in the shade to await the promised repose.
Selecting his prey he muttered: "'Tain't HIM, but he'll hev to do, THIS time." The weapon rang out sharply. The stricken officer threw up his sword arm, his bridle arm clutched his saddle-pommel, as if resisting the attempt of Death to unhorse him. Then the muscles all relaxed, and he fell into he arms of those who had hurried to him.
Once he twisted his seamed face about in time to catch us smiling at his odd figure, and growled to himself as he kicked at his horse's flanks. It was thus we rounded the bend and saw before us the little clearing with the cabin in the centre of its green heart. At sight of it my eyes grew moist and I rested my fingers gently upon the white hand that lay against her saddle-pommel.
Jack sat sketching in a canvas-covered book, raising his brown eyes from time to time, or writing on a pad laid flat on his saddle-pommel. The two young fellows conversed in low tones, laughing quietly or smoking in absorbed silence, and even their subdued voices were louder than the roll of the distant cannonade.
Without concerted plans, obeying no signal but the promptings of the impulse that snatched, unerring, at opportunity the men, Delaney and Christian from one side, the sheriff and the deputy from the other, rushed in. They did not fire. It was Dyke alive they wanted. One of them had a riata snatched from a saddle-pommel, and with this they tried to bind him.
Almost dead from the saddle-pommel which knocked the breath from my body, suffocated and strangled with dust, I hung dangling there in a storm of flying sticks and pebbles. Twice consciousness fled, only to return with the blood pounding in my ears.
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