When the Englishmen were gone, Belle looked after their retreating wagon, and sighed. She was just realizing, now that the week was past and these clean, courteous, easy-moving beings of another world were gone, that she had been dreaming dreams. Emilio looked also, sometimes after the wagon, sometimes after the girl. When he bent his gaze on Belle he was serious enough, but when his eye ran down the track of bloody dots, he drew his lips back from his white teeth, and smiled. He was holding the reins of his roan bronco; he dropped them to lean over the fence, and looked up the road, away from the wagon. “What is it that you see up there?” she asked, carelessly, in Spanish. “Something that your white-haired friend will be glad to see,” he answered. She looked, saw the dust-cloud coming, saw the little, caking pool of blood, and went white in a moment. “That,” she cried, “that is what your antelope meant! You knew that cattle were coming this way to-day.” “A thousand head passing up to the White River country. And wild, very wild.” “They will trample them; kill them!” “You thought about that when you kissed him,” he sneered; “the blood goes straight, and the wind is right. He will have a run for it--your lover.” Then the roar of padding feet was louder, and the herd was coming. They were fifty yards away--and a great, white steer, horned in splendor, lowered his muzzle, and bellowed, and tore the earth, and shot out in advance. Another followed, and still another, each breaking into that rocking run, each one stretching out his nostrils to taste the polluted air. They plunged together over the little pool of blood; they rolled over and over, horns tossing, feet stamping, throats acclaim. The leaders crowded against the corral until its foot-wide posts bent and cracked. A deafening roar, the bellow of a thousand mad cattle, and then nothing but a tangled riot, speeding on down the scent, a thousand great, horned hounds after their quarry. It was the blood stampede that makes half-wild cattle wholly demons. A clap of lightning, a sudden shot, even the appearance of a dismounted man, will send the mercurial herd rushing in panic fear; but let them once scent blood, and all hell is loosed in them. No pack of wolves follows with the relentless fury of range cattle on the trail of blood. Huddled by the barn, still showing his teeth, but half in fright, at the box of demons that he had opened, the man who laid the trail knew all this. And the girl knew it best of all. She was between him and his horse as she turned on him. “You did this--you murderer!” “I will go,” he said; “I will cut it loose--it will stop the cattle.”