continued silent. Off toward the settlement all was still.
Overhead, the early-morning sky pressed low, spotless and shimmering,
brooding. Around and about, the flies seemed to stop buzzing. Everywhere
lurked the quiet. The earth appeared bowed in humiliation, hushed in
prayer as for the unfortunate one, while up and down the trail, basking
in world-old light, lay dust of centuries, smug and contented in its
quiescence. All nature was still, gripped in tense quiet.

The crack of a whip broke it. Felipe, suddenly bestirring himself, had
sprung forward and dealt the horse a blow with the butt. Across the
nose, it had sounded hollow and distant; and the horse, whipping up his
head in surprised pain, now turned upon the man a look at once sorrowful
and terrible, a look which spelled death and destruction. Nor did he
only look. With a strange outcry, shrill and piercing, awaking the
canyon in unnatural echoes, he whirled in his harness and reared, reared
despite his harness, and struck out with venomous force. It was quick as
a lightning flash, but, quick as it was, Felipe avoided it. And it was
fortunate that he did. Terror-stricken and dropping the whip, he sped to
the rear, to a point behind the cart, and there turned amazed eyes at
the pirouetting horse.

What manner of horse was this, he asked himself. Could it be that this
horse, black as night, was truly of the lower regions? Certainly he
looked it, balancing there on his hind legs, with his reddened eyes and
inflamed nostrils! And--But what was this? From the corral had come a
shrill nicker, the voice of the aged mare. But that was not it! With the
outcry, seemingly an answer to the black's maddened outcry, the black
dropped to all-fours again, turning quick ears and eyes in the direction
of the sound! What manner of horse was this, anyway? Never before had he
seen such a horse! He felt himself go limp.

There is a call in nature that sounds for life against death. It is a
call put forth in innumerable different tongues around the world, and it
sounds somewhere every second of the day and darkness--through jungles,
across swamps, down mountains, over plains, out of valleys. It is a cry
of warning, a cry to disarm foes. It is an outcry of good as against
evil--the squawk of a hen to her chicks, the bleat of a sheep to her
lambs, the grunt of a sow to her sucklings, the bellow of a cow to her
calf, the purr of a cat to her kittens, the whine of a dog to her
puppies,