n a hundred yards behind.
Soapy had succeeded in getting clear of the great body of steers, but
there were a few still running ahead of him, and he was riding
desperately to pass them.

Just as Sanderson looked back he saw Soapy's horse stumble. He
recovered, ran a few steps and stumbled again. This time he went to
one knee. He tried desperately to rise, fell again, and went down,
neighing shrilly in terror.

Sanderson groaned and tried to pull Streak up. But the animal refused
to heed the pull on the reins and plunged forward, unheeding.

There would have been no opportunity to save Soapy, even if Streak had
obeyed his master. The first few steers at the head of the mass
swerved around the fallen man and his horse, for they could see him.

The thousands behind, though, running blindly, in the grip of the
nameless terror that had seized them, saw nothing, heeded nothing, and
they swept, in a smother of dust, straight over the spot where Soapy
and his horse had been.

White-lipped, catching his breath in gasps over the horror, Sanderson
again turned his back to the herd and raced on. The same accident
might happen to him, but there was no time to pick and choose his trail.

Behind him, with the thundering noise of a devastating avalanche, the
herd came as though nothing had happened. The late moon that had been
touching the peaks of the far mountains now lifted a rim over them,
flooding the world with a soft radiance. Sanderson had reached the
center of the trail, through Devil's Hole, before he again looked back.

What he saw caused him to pull Streak up with a jerk. The head of the
herd had burst through the entrance to the Hole, and, opening fanlike,
had gone headlong into the quicksand.

Fascinated with the magnitude of the catastrophe, Sanderson paid no
attention to the few steers that went past him, snorting wildly; he sat
rigid on his horse and watched the destruction of the herd.

A great mass of steers had gone into the quicksand at the very edge of
the Hole; they formed a foothold for many others that, forced on by the
impetus of the entire mass, crushed them down, trampled them further
into the sand, and plunged ahead to their own destruction.

It was a continually recurring incident. Maddened, senseless,
unreasoning in their panic, the mass behind came on, a sea of tossing
horns, a maelstrom of swirling, blinding dust and heaving bodies into
the mire; the struggling, enmeshed bodies of th