It was a good ten minutes before the riders appeared, four of them at a hard gallop, leaning forward, holding their rifles out to one side. John Grady let go the reins and swiveled and cocked the rifle and fired. Blevins' horse stood twisting like a circus horse and the captain must have sawed back on Redbo's reins because he stopped dead in the middle of the road and John Grady fell against him and almost pushed him forward out of the saddle. Behind him the riders were pulling up their mounts and milling in the road and he levered a fresh round into the rifle and fired again and by now Redbo had turned in the road to face the pull of the rope and the Blevins horse was wholly out of control and he swung around and whacked the captain's arm with the barrel of the rifle to make him drop the reins and he took the reins up and hauled Redbo around and whacked him with the rifle and looked back again. The riders had quit the road but he saw the last horse disappear into the brush and he knew which side they'd taken. He leaned down and got hold of the rope and drew the walleyed horse to him and coiled the rope and snubbed the horse up short and whacked Redbo again and trotting side by side they overtook the two horses in the road before them and herded them off into the brush and out onto the rolling country west of the town. The captain half turned to him with some new complaint but he only hugged his loathesome charge more fondly, the captain tottering woodenly in the saddle before him with his pain like a storedummy carried off for a prank. They rode down into a broad flat arroyo and he put the horses into a lope, his leg throbbing horribly and the captain crying out to be left. The arroyo bore east by the sun and they followed it for a good distance until it began to narrow and grow rocky and the loose horses before him to step cautiously and look toward the slopes above them. He hazed them on and they clambered up through traprock fallen from the rim country above and they led up onto the northfacing slope and along a barren gravel ridge where he gripped the captain anew and looked back. The riders were fanned over the open country a mile below him and he counted not four but six of them before they dropped from sight into a draw. He loosed the rope from the saddlehorn in front of the captain and dallied it again with more slack.