This was just what I wanted. I believed that on open ground in a fair tail-on-end chase I could overtake either it or any other mustang in Mexico; and my hope was that it might give me a fair chance without taking to cover.
Although I had hunted its wild congeners on the prairies of Texas, it proved the swiftest thing in mustang shape I had ever followed, and I soon began to doubt my capacity to overtake it.
After I had ridden more than a mile along the edge of the forest timber, the creature seemed as far ahead of me as ever! I was fast losing faith in the fleetness of Moro; for I knew that he had been going at top speed all the time, while the mustang appeared to have preserved the distance with which it had started.
It has heels equal to yours, Moro, I said mutteringly to my own horse. It will be a question of bottom between you.
Was Moro stung by my reproach? He seemed so. Perhaps my thoughts were his? At all events I could feel him perceptibly mending his pace; and perceived, moreover, that he was at last gaining ground upon the fugitive.
There was a natural reason for this, though I did not think of it at the moment. The first mile of the chase had been down hill so much the worse for Moro. He was a true Arab; his ancestors had been denizens of the great plains of the Sahara a race of steeds famed for fleetness on the level course. The mustang, on the contrary, was by birth and habits a mountaineer ; and either up-hill or down hill would have been the track of his selection.
Going down the slope, he had maintained his distance, or nearly so; but now that the chase led along a level tract of country, he was losing it length by length so perceptibly, that I began to grope around the pommel of my saddle, to assure myself of the readiness of my lazo.
Perhaps another mile was passed over in the chase, without any change taking place; except that I saw myself constantly closing in towards the heels of the riderless horse. Then a change did occur, and one altogether unexpected: the mustang suddenly disappeared from my sight!
Story 1, Chapter XIX The Captor Captured
I declined taking the diagonal direction. By doing so I might have headed the mustang; but I feared that the timber might mislead me, and I should lose the animal altogether.
I kept on, therefore, to the point where it had entered the wood.
On reaching this point, I perceived that I had been mistaken. The mustang had not entered the timber at all, but had turned into a sort of alley, or opening, among the trees along which it was still going in full gallop, as when last seen.
I hesitated not to follow. I was by this time too much excited to think of consequences. Moros spirit was, like my own, roused to a pitch closely bordering upon the reckless; and on we went through the forest aisle that appeared to grow gloomier the farther we penetrated under its shadows.
It was a forest of silk-cotton trees as I could tell by the flossy down that lay scattered along the ground; but while noting this, I saw something else of far greater significance something, in fact, that seemed to whisper to me, You are riding fast, but you may be riding too far.
The thing that suggested this thought was an observation I made at the moment. Though going at full gallop along what appeared to be a natural avenue between the trees, I could not help perceiving that the ground under my horses feet was thickly imprinted with tracks. They were the hoof-prints of horses that, not long before, must have passed over it, going in the same direction as myself I might have taken them for a wild herd the cavallada belonging to some grazing hacienda of which there were more than
one among the half-prairie chapparals that surrounded me; but this conjecture was nipped in the bud, on my perceiving among the tracks more than one set made by horses, that had been handled by the herradero .
I knew that shod horses were rarely or never found in the grazing cavallada ; and therefore the large troop that had preceded me through the forest opening, must have had saddles upon their backs, and men bestriding them.
I had gone a good way into the timber before arriving at this conclusion.
I need not say that it affected my further advance. The horsemen who had trodden the track before me must be enemies; they could not be friends. I was now full three miles from the main road leading from Vera Cruz to Jalapa and I knew that no troop of our cavalry had left it.
Besides, the shod-tracks I saw were those of mustangs, or Mexican horses so much smaller in their circumference than those of the American horse, that I could note the difference, even in the glance allowed by the rapidity of my onward gallop.
Mexican cavalry must have passed over the ground, perhaps in retreat from the field of Cerro Gordo; but even so, they might not have proceeded far, since they could have but little fear of our following them in that crosscountry direction.
I was beginning to repent of my recklessness. Already my bridle-rein was, by a half-mechanical effort on my part, perceptibly becoming tighter along the neck of my steed, when the chase that had lured me so far, presented an aspect to seduce me still further.