Bim translated Quelele’s intelligence for Grant. “Our li’l friend Urgo’s been burnin’ the wind,” was his dry comment. Grant sent a quick glance around the cul-de-sac of rock which encompassed them.

“Not the best place in the world to stand off ten men,” he gave his opinion. “We ought to get our backs up against something that can’t be surrounded.”

Quelele read the white man’s thoughts, for he pointed farther up the caÑon beyond the lava cistern. There the gorge narrowed to a veritable doorway and the steps thereto were so precipitous that one ascending would have to scramble and claw a way on hands and knees; no possible chance for a rush en masse. Bim surveyed the natural citadel with the eye of a trained Border man who occasionally has to reckon with such elementals as the killing power of a rifle bullet and the protective quality of a ’dobe wall. Finally he screwed one eye at the crack of sky showing between the escarpments and shook his head dubiously at what he saw there. Quelele, who had had the superior advantage of a wider view from his aerie on the cliff top, bowed his arms in the shape of a ball and waved a hand to the west.

“Papago says it’s a big storm brewing over yonder,” Bim explained. “When these thunderheads finally get all boiled into one and come a-runnin’ it’s a case of take to cover. If this thing is the regulation rim-fire sock-dollager they’s goin’ be a sight of water pass over where we’re standin’ before long. Me, I’d rather be somewhere else than in this dry channel.”

Grant did not linger to discuss strategy longer. He went to where Benicia was sleeping in the shade of a boulder and gently touched her on the shoulder. The girl sat up, startled.

“We have to be moving,” Grant told her. “Quelele has just reported Urgo and his rurales out on the desert and coming our way.”

“And El Doctor?” she quickly interposed. “He has returned from the cave?”

Grant shook his head. Bitter disappointment flashed into her eyes at the realization of how fate had played to interpose the grim business of a fight just on the minute of realization of her great hopes. Grant, stooping beside her and watching the play of emotions on her features, saw quick remorse chase away the frown. Impulsively a brown hand reached out to play upon the back of his.

“Grant, beloved”—how like the overtones from her own golden harp the contralto richness of her voice!—“I am desperately selfish and you will not understand.—Thinking only of my own purpose—bringing you with your wound still unhealed out to this place to face—death perhaps.—And you do this for me—”

“’Nicia, little girl—” He could go no farther than those words, for the song in his heart was overwhelming. At last—at last the trammels of the girl’s heart were shaken off and the call he’d waited for so long had come! Call of the heart of her to his.

She was on her feet, vibrant with energy, alive to the exigencies of impending action. Bim was saddling the horses and Quelele had the pack on the mule when they joined them. Bim briefly explained to the girl his survey of the gorge for strategical strength; at any cost they must move up until they could find some sheep trail or other practicable ledge giving escape from the flood water channel. “If that doddering old medicine man would only quit his sing-song business and come back for a rifle we’d be that much better off,” the big fellow grumbled.

When all was in readiness Quelele led the way up the tortuous watercourse and through the mighty gates of porphyry nearly blocking the farther reaches. They were forced to lead the animals, whose sure-footedness was put to the test every yard of the advance. Beyond the great pillars the gorge opened to a rough amphitheatre with less steeply sloping sides. A narrow upward-springing ledge of rock led away from the dry watercourse to a rock pulpit some seventy-five or a hundred feet above. This they followed, to discover there was space for their horses to stand behind the horn of malapais and still be screened from observation from below. Quelele made some mysterious passes with a tether rope which yoked all the animals to a single line that was anchored at both ends.

“Look,” Benicia cried as Bim was taking the carbines from the saddle scabbards. They followed her pointing hand and saw a dark spot against the opposite wall of the gorge and higher than their level. A midget figure was outlined against the opening of a cave. It was El Doctor at his business of propitiating Elder Brother—El Doctor, much needed behind the stock of a carbine. The men hallooed to him but he did not turn.

“Go over and get that crazy fool,” Bim commanded Quelele. But the big Indian, instead of obeying immediately, turned up the ledge and made for a high point on the shoulder of the rock bastion constituting one of the portals of the upper gorge. They watched him as he scaled the almost perpendicular face of black lava. From the top Quelele had a view of the caÑon’s far-away exit onto the desert floor several miles from the niche where the treasure seekers had refuge. The watchers saw him lift himself cautiously over the top of his lookout and peer to westward. Then he came scrambling and sliding down.

“They come into the valley,” the Papago reported. “Too late to get El Doctor.”

It was Bim with his desert craft who made disposition of the little force of defence. Quelele he sent back to the aerie with orders not to shoot until he heard shots from the whites; the Indian’s fire from the rear, once Urgo and his men had passed the rocky portals, would throw the rurales into confusion. Grant and Benicia he disposed behind an outcrop of porphyry a little behind and above the protected animals.

“Pick ’em off as they come through the Gate,” he suggested. “An’ don’t try any fancy shooting; we haven’t got any too many cartridges.”

“But you—?” Benicia began. The Arizonan grinned broadly.

“Me, I always fancy a little solo game in this sort of rukus. I’m going on t’other side of the gulch. Cross-fire, you sabe?” He left them with a smile on his lips, and they watched him jumping lightly down from rock to rock. Almost before he had begun to clamber up the opposite wall he was lost to view amid the maze of fissure and castellated boulder. Grant and the girl were stretched out behind their primitive breastwork alone in this unfinished world of fire. They could see neither Quelele nor Bagley. Came to their ears the faint drone of barbaric song: El Doctor Coyote Belly at his traitorous devotions.

The whole gorge was filled with a saffron glare like the reflection from oil fires under a boiler, unworldly, portentous.

They waited, these two, in the immensity of earth’s disgorged bowels. Side by side, elbows touching, they counted the slow drag of minutes as naught in the balance against the deep joy of love militant.

A stir in the bed of the dry wash below them. Up went their carbines with cheeks laid against wood and eyes sighting along the lances of light. Again the stir down there. A gaunt figure rose from hand and knees to its feet, stood swaying for an instant, then pitched forward against the support of a slab of rock.

A very leprechaun of the rocks was it: ribs creasing burned skin about the naked torso; whity-grey hair streaming down to mingle with a beard; bare arms like a spider’s legs and all cracked by the sun. The husk of Doc Stooder, plaything of the desert god, was come here, following the still living spark of instinct prompting a water search in a canyon. Come, too, to the secret hiding place of the treasure whose glitter had so mercilessly befooled him.

Grant, stupefied by the apparition of death and failing in any recognition of the skeleton thing as the bibulous doctor of Arizora, suspected a trick of Urgo. Again he laid his eye along his rifle sight, vigilant for what might ensue. The creature spread-eagled against the rock slowly pushed itself upright with its hands; its shaggy head turned wearily as thirsting eyes scanned the dry chasm.

Then a shout from across the gorge. Bagley had leaped from his hiding place and was rushing precariously down to succour the ghost. Just as he reached Stooder and had thrown an arm about him to heave his wasted form onto a shoulder the crack of a rifle shivered the gorge’s silence. Rock dust spurted within a foot of the rescuer.

The sun went out that second—instantly, like a powerful incandescent switched off. A yellow penumbra tinged the darkness.

Almost as one the rifles of Grant and Benicia jetted lead. Two more shots from the dry wash. The giant figure of Bagley with Stooder limp over one shoulder never faltered in its leaping and scrambling up the declivity to the shelter he had quitted. The two who had been following his flight with stilled hearts saw him disappear behind a great rock; an instant and a jet of fire lanced down thence at the attackers by the Gate.

A blob of rain large as a Mexican dollar smacked on Benicia’s hand as she pumped the ejector—another and a third. Then the gorge was blasted by a thunder shock amid the peaks, and a stab of lightning painted the whole pit sulphurous blue. By its flash the defenders saw scurrying figures leaping from rock to rock in the stream bed. Quelele, the quick of eye, fired his first shot by the light of storm fire; one of the rurales went down like a wet sack.

A second stunning burst of thunder which knocked out the underpinning of the sky. Then deluge.

It was not rain that fell; it was solid water in sheets and cones which hissed with the speed of its descent. Water so compacted that it was like a river on edge, engulfing. With it the almost continuous quiver and jerk of electrical flame. The gorge was become a watery hell. More than that, for Urgo and his men in the wash it threatened momentarily to be their tomb. Already a white streak of foam in the lightning flashes marked where the once bone-dry watercourse was changing character.

The rurales and their leader found the odds all of a sudden snatched from their hands by this frenzied ally of the hunted girl and her supporters. They had come eleven against five, with their quarry caught in a hole in the Pinacate sierra; before the cloudburst had endured three minutes Urgo realized he had let himself and his men into a fatal trap. Their horses, confidently left behind them in the lower reaches of the gorge, must already have stampeded under the lash of the storm. Spiteful rifle flashes from both sides came with each baleful flicker of fire from the sky to deny escape from the rising waters up either wall of the chasm.

Now a dull roaring above the waterfall of the rain began to fill the gash in the sierra. Away back at the head of the gorge and where the slope from the twin volcano peaks shed water as from steep roofs into this common trough, a solid wall, capped dull white, came with the speed of a meteor down and down through the channel in the living rock. It rolled boulders the size of box-cars in its flood; a chevaux-de-frise of barbed cactus and scrub trees tumbled at its crest.

Even above the tumult of the deluge sounded the shrill alarm of the rurales as they broke position and turned to flee through the Gate. But already the flood was there, choking egress. They must scramble up the sides of the gorge like rats from a flooded hold; they must grope and cling by every illuminating flash of blue fire, waiting to see where the next handhold lay, how near the hungry yellow waters rushed.

With Grant and the girl was nothing but security. Unprotected, they had bent their heads to the pounding mallets of water. When the firing abruptly ceased at the rush of their attackers for safety Grant heard the scream of a horse near at hand and remembered their tethered animals. Should they break away in their fright the plight of all five would be a desperate one.

“Stay here!” he shouted in Benicia’s ear. “Going to the horses!”

Grant crawled and groped his way over the slippery rocks, each seeming to be alive with the film of rushing water across it. He clambered down and to the right until he came to the pulpit rock behind which the beasts had been tethered by Quelele. The mule he found down, hopelessly noosed in his hobble rope and slowly strangling; the horses were huddled, tails to the storm, dripping and dejected.

It took several minutes’ precarious work to get the pack-animal to his feet and freshly tethered. Then Grant began the retreat to the breastwork where he had left the girl. It was largely a matter of guesswork. Once he found himself against an unscalable wall and had to retrace his steps. Another time one foot slipped and he caught himself with his body halfway over the brink.

A flash of lightning showed him two rifles lying side by side on a ledge below him—his rifle and Benicia’s; but the girl was gone. The fist of fear smote him terrifically.

He screamed her name above the bellowing of the flood in the wash. No answer. He ran along the ledge that had been theirs until he came to a downward terrace; to that he leaped and along its blind way he fumbled. Came the ghost of a scream, thin above the diapason all about. His name—“Grant!”

Then merciful lightning blazed blue and he saw. Below him on a broad shelf which overhung the whiteness of the torrent two figures, glistening like seals, were locked—they swayed.

The man launched himself blindly out and down. He rolled; he slipped and wallowed against and under great boulders. At the end of seconds seeming Æons he came to the rock apron where he had seen the struggling shapes. Sound of stertorous breathing guided him. He rose from his knees before Benicia and another, who was trying to drag her along the ledge. A revealing flash of fire gave him just a glimpse of a weasel face—Colonel Urgo.

Not so much rage as loathly horror of an unclean thing sped furious summons to every muscle spring in his body. With his shoulder planted against the Spaniard’s chest for a leverage Grant tore loose the man’s grip from Benicia. Before he could whirl to shift his attack Urgo had screamed an oath and was on the American’s back, legs twining to cumber Grant’s thighs, both hands clamped about his throat. It was the catamount’s attack.

The first impact of his antagonist’s weight nearly over-balanced Grant and precipitated both into the maelstrom of waters not six feet below their ledge. But, steadying himself, the American suddenly launched backward, pinning the lighter body on his back against a wall of rock. It was a terrific smash. Urgo’s breath came in a whistle from it. His hands sank deeper into the muscles about Grant’s throat, closing his windpipe. Deliberately the standing man took a few forward steps, then swiftly back against the wall again. An elbow of rock found the Spaniard’s ribs and cracked two. He shrieked.

Now Grant’s hands went up to lock behind the head that sagged over his right shoulder. Strength of desperation flooded into his arms, for the weaker man had him throttled. Urgo must release his hold on Grant’s throat or suffer a broken neck. The constricting hands slackened their grip ever so little. Grant bowed his shoulders, gave a mighty heave and swept the Colonel’s body over his shoulder in a wide arc. The man sprawled, arms wide, through the air, struck the edge of the rocky apron. He clawed—slipped—clawed again, and disappeared.