He landed on stiff legs, checked his forward impetus and flung
sidewise. On solid footing he would have dodged successfully; as it
was the noose barely clipped past his ear.
As the rope touched his neck, it seemed to Alcatraz that every wound
dealt him by the hand of man was suddenly aching and bleeding again,
the skin along his flanks quivered where the spurs of Cordova had
driven home time and again, and on shoulders and belly and hips
there were burning stripes where the quirt had raised its wale. Most
horrible of all, in his mouth came the taste of iron and his own blood
where the Spanish bit had wrenched his jaws apart. Out of the old days
he might have remembered the first and bitterest lesson--that it is
folly to pull against a rope--but now he saw nothing save the fleeing
forms of the seven mares and his own freedom vanishing with them. In
his mid-leap the lariat hummed taut, sank in a burning circle into
the flesh at the base of his neck, and he was flung to the ground. No
man's power could have stopped him so short; the cunning enemy had
turned a half-hitch around the top of that deep-rooted rock.
He landed, not inert, but shocked out of hysteria into all his old
cunning--that wily savagery which had kept Cordova in fear, ten-fold
more terrible since the free life had clothed him with his full
strength.
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