Elbert changed the quality of his shouting, but the Mexican had let go the bridle-rein, and was speeding after his two companions, who had vanished from the circle of firelight. They were at their horses--mounting and spurring away. Elbert rubbed his dazed eyes--they were gone--Mamie trotting toward him, head extra high to keep from tripping on her bridle-reins. The whistle had done it--and his shouts, which must have sounded like a platoon closing in, to the leaderless bandit party. The whistle for Mamie, the yell--Elbert did not know how he had come to vent that, unless for his own courage. Never before had he felt such a sense of belonging anywhere, as when he folded over the Pitcairn stock-saddle. Sitting straight did not suffice; he seemed fallen to clinging to the neck of his mare. Even a minute later, he would have forgotten Bart’s sorrel, tied securely in the bristling live-oak scrub, had not Mamie flirted her signal as she galloped by on the moon-drenched hill. ‘They sure thought I was the rurales,’ he laughed. At this juncture he missed his saddle-bags. ‘I suppose Bart would go back and get them right now,’ he thought. ‘Not for me. Nothing in them I can’t do without. What silver there is--those three fellows I ditched last night--may need that!’ His eyes were craning about the sky to locate the north star. ‘I won’t have to tell Bart how I lost Mamie, nor about the other three,’ he communed later. ‘Now that I’ve got her back, I won’t have to speak of it at all.’ It was a different matter about that grain-sack, however. The horses would need that, and another drink from the creek to-night, before facing to-morrow in the brown and sultry hills. He made the big circle to the Fonseca road and the alders, but was back in a star-rimmed mountain wilderness two hours before daybreak, the big gelding taking an occasional nip at the grain-bag as he trotted along. XXV ELBERT LEARNS TO WAIT NEXT day Elbert climbed the foothills and explored the mountains eastward. He found many tracks of water, stream-beds of the rainy season, but it was now autumn, the dryest time of the year, and hours passed before he followed a trickle up a dim ravine to its first pool. He had to grant that it was the horses that helped him locate the water in the first place, but there was queer satisfaction about the experience, as if he had been marooned on an island and his life depended. No water ever tasted just like that. He watched the horses drink and graze, and made them stand for a half hour at a time in the sludgy grass at the side of the stream, while he stared up from the shadowed cañon to where the sunlight burned on the ridges. ‘Only one thing better than water for a horse’s hoofs,’ old Bob Leadley had said, ‘and that’s more water.’