Only Lite, cool as though he were rounding up milch cows, rode half-turned in the saddle and sent shot after shot back at the line of Navajos, with such swift precision that the Indians swerved and fell back a little, leaving another pony wallowing in the sand and taking with them one fellow who limped until he had climbed up behind one who waited for him.
"Go it, Johnny--dang yore measly hide, go to it! We'll show 'm we ain't so old 'n' tender we cain't turn a trick t'bug their dang eyes out?
Bust into it! WE'LL show 'em!--" And Applehead shrilled a raucous range "HOO-EEE-EE!" as Johnny lunged against the taut wires.
It was a long chance he took--a "dang long chance" as Applehead admitted afterward.

But, as he had hoped, it happened that Johnny's stride brought him with a forward leap against the wires, so that the full impact of his eleven-hundred pounds plus the momentum of his speed, plus the weight of Applehead and the saddle, hit the wires fair and full.
They popped like cut wires on a bale of hay--and it was lucky that they were tight strung so that there was no slack to take some of the force away.

It was not luck, but plain shrewdness on Applehead's part, that Johnny came straight on, so that there was no tearing see-saw of the strands as they broke.

Two inch-long cuts on his chest and a deeper, longer one on his foreleg was the price Johnny paid, and that was all.
The lower wire he never touched, since it was a leap that landed him against the fence.

He lurched and recovered himself, and went on at a slower gallop while Applehead beckoned the three to come on.
"I kain't say I'd want to git in the habit uh bustin' fences that way," he grinned over his shoulder as the three jumped through the gap he had made and forged up to him.