Galloper's Ridge. The vehicle itself was only a huge lumbering shadow;
its side-lights were carefully extinguished, and Yuba Bill had just
politely removed from the lips of an outside passenger even the cigar
with which he had been ostentatiously exhibiting his coolness. For it
had been rumored that the Ramon Martinez gang of "road agents" were
"laying" for us on the second grade, and would time the passage of our
lights across Galloper's in order to intercept us in the "brush" beyond.
If we could cross the ridge without being seen, and so get through the
brush before they reached it, we were safe. If they followed, it would
only be a stern chase with the odds in our favor.

The huge vehicle swayed from side to side, rolled, dipped, and
plunged, but Bill kept the track, as if, in the whispered words of the
Expressman, he could "feel and smell" the road he could no longer see.
We knew that at times we hung perilously over the edge of slopes that
eventually dropped a thousand feet sheer to the tops of the sugar-pines
below, but we knew that Bill knew it also. The half visible heads of the
horses, drawn wedge-wise together by the tightened reins, appeared to
cleave the darkness like a ploughshare, held between his rigid
hands. Even the hoof-beats of the six horses had fallen into a vague,
monotonous, distant roll. Then the ridge was crossed, and we plunged
into the still blacker obscurity of the brush. Rather we no longer
seemed to move--it was only the phantom night that rushed by us. The
horses might have been submerged in some swift Lethean stream; nothing
but the top of the coach and the rigid bulk of Yuba Bill arose above
them. Yet even in that awful moment our speed was unslackened; it was
as if Bill cared no longer to GUIDE but only to drive, or as if the
direction of his huge machine was determined by other hands than his. An
incautious whisperer hazarded the paralyzing suggestion of our "meeting
another team." To our great astonishment Bill overheard it; to our