"You are just in time," said Mead, "and I'm mighty glad. I'll have to
ask you to sit on this man's chest and hold him down while I tie him
fast to that mesquite."
Marguerite sat down on the Mexican's breast while Mead tied his wrists
tightly together and then began fastening them to the stocky stem of
the bush beside which he had fallen. Antone struggled and tried to
throw her off, and Mead said:
"I think, Miss Delarue, you'd better put your thumbs on his windpipe
and press a little, just to keep him from fighting too hard. We've got
no time to waste on him."
Marguerite gasped and hesitated, but her eye fell on little Paul's
unconscious figure, and she did as he asked her.
"There," said Mead. "Now get up and jump quickly away."
The prostrate Mexican struggled and rolled about, but he could not
rise. Marguerite ran to the child and with her ear to his breast she
called to Mead.
"His heart is beating! He is still alive!"
Mead caught Antone's horse, and with Marguerite behind him and the
child on one arm started off on the gallop. A long, straggling line of
searchers stretched across the mesa, the nearest at least four miles
away. As Mead came nearer he dropped the bridle on the horse's neck
and waved his hat and shouted again and again. At last he attracted
the attention of the nearest ones, and two or three came running
toward him. "Water! Water!" he called, at the top of his voice. They
understood, and one ran back to the nearest horseman, who galloped off
to a group of people still farther away.
Almost instantly the great throng, like a huge organism, animated by
one thought, started off across the mesa toward the galloping horse,
every atom in it moved by the single purpose to reach at once the
new-found babe. Two horses in front of the hastening multitude ran at
their topmost speed and distanced all the others. One carried Pierre
Delarue and the other Doctor Long, and behind them came horsemen,
carts, carriages and people on foot, all rushing to the one point.
The physician administered such restoratives as he had with him and
brought the boy back to consciousness. Then, in the shade of a canopy
phaeton, he carried the child home in his arms, while Marguerite and
her father and Emerson Mead followed in another carriage, and all the
crowd came pouring along after them.
But there were four men who stayed behind. Joe Davis and John Daniels
and two others, all in perfect accord and friendliness, went back to
find Antone Colorow. They had listened to Mead's hastily told story of
how Antone had attacked and delayed him. Daniels and Davis had looked
at each other with a single significant glance and the one remark,
"We'd better attend to him!" And then they had taken the other two men
and started back.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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