Occasionally the earth jumped with brief abruptness, causing hair to
crackle at the roots, and dust-laden as it was, make as if to rise on
end. The squirrels were screeching in the trees. The birds pitifully
twittered. Even the leaves rustled in response to those terrible
quivers.

The cattle were a red streak at the end of the perspective. The boys
rose, shook themselves, and walked heavily to their tethered mustangs.
The poor beasts were trembling and whinnying; they greeted their young
masters with a quavering neigh of relief. The boys mounted; but although
they rode rapidly, with ever increasing impatience, they paused every
few moments to listen; there was likely to be a return stampede at any
moment. More than once they were obliged to swerve suddenly aside from
yawning rifts, and they passed a spring of boiling water, spouting and
hissing upward, which had not been there in the morning. They were too
frightened to talk; not only the paralysing awe of the earthquake was
upon them, but the least imaginative saw his home levelled to the
ground, his relatives and friends trodden down into the cracking earth.
Hills lay between them and the Casa Encarnacion.

There were two exits from the valley where the branding had taken place:
one, very narrow, to the right, which led directly to the house, the
other straight ahead, almost as broad as the valley itself. The boys saw
at a glance that pursued and pursuers had taken the more spacious way,
and they followed without consultation.

The crushed grass looked like green blood, but there was no other
evidence of slaughter; the mustangs had been fleeter than the cattle.
The latter had evidently kept well together, for on either side of a
swath some three hundred yards in width, the grass stood high.