safe
with him. Ramon held this thought to his soul amid the general wreck.
This one friend at least was true. Meantime yonder was a Miguelete
behind a stone--a clumsy one withal. He, El Sarria, would teach him the
elements of his trade. He drew a bead on the exposed limb. The piece
cracked, and with a yell the owner rolled back behind his protecting
boulder. For the next hour not a cap-stem was seen, not a twig of
juniper waved.

El Sarria laughed grimly. His eye was still true and his rifle good as
ever. That was another friend on whose fidelity he could rely. He patted
the brown polished stock almost as he used to do little Lola's cheek in
the evenings when they sat at their door to watch Jose, the goatherd,
bringing his tinkling flock of brown skins and full udders up from the
scanty summer pasturage of the dried watercourses.

Ah, there at last! The mist rose quite quickly with a heave of huge
shoulders, strong and yet unconscious, like a giant turning in his
sleep. From every direction at once the mist seemed to swirl upwards
till the cave mouth was whelmed in a chaos of grey tormented spume, like
the gloom of a thundercloud. Then again it appeared to thin out till the
forms of mountains very far away were seen as in a dream. But Ramon knew
how fallacious this mirage was, and that the most distant of these
seeming mountain summits could be reached in a dozen strides--that is,
if you did not break your neck on the way, much the most probable
supposition of all.

Ramon waited till the mist was at its thickest, rising in hissing
spume-clouds out of the deeps. Then with a long indrawing of breath into
his lungs, like a swimmer before the plunge, he struck out straight for
the cave on the face of the Montblanch from which the bullets had come.

But long ere he reached it, the ground, which had been fairly level so
far, though strewn with myriads of rocky fragments chipped off by winter
frosts and loosened by spring rains, broke suddenly into a succession of
precipices. There was only one way down, and El Sarria, making as if he
would descend by it, sent instead a great boulder bounding and roaring
down the pass.

He heard a shouting of men, a crash and scattering thunder of falling
fragments far below. A gun went off. A chorus of angry voices
apostrophised the owner, who had, according to them, just as much chance
of shooting one of his comrades as El Sarria.

Ramon laughed when he heard this, and loosening a se