torn clothing, we stood on a level rock
like a tiny mesa set out from the high summit of the cliff.

Eloise sat down at my feet as I looked back eagerly over the precipitous
way we had come, and watched the band of Mexicans less rapidly swarming
up the same steep, devious trail.

Three hundred feet below us lay the plain with the thin current of the
San Christobal River sparkling here and there in the sunlight. The black
spot on the trail that scarcely moved must be Beverly and Little Blue
Flower with Sister Anita. No, there was only the Indian girl there, and
something moving in and out of the shadow near them. I could not see for
the intervening rocks.

"Gail! Gail! You will not let them take you. You will not leave me,"
Eloise moaned.

And I was one against a dozen. I stooped to where she sat and gently
lifted her limp white hand, saying:

"Eloise, I was on a rock like this a night and a day alone on the
prairie. I could not move nor cry out. But something inside told me to
'hold fast'--the old law of the trail. You must do that with me now."

A shout broke over the valley and the rocks about us seemed suddenly to
grow men, as if every pictograph of the old stone age had become a
sentient thing, a being with a Mexican dress, and the soul of a devil.
Just across a narrow chasm, a little below us, Ferdinand Ramero stood in
all the insolence of a conqueror, with a smile that showed his white
teeth, and in his steely eyes was the glitter of a snake about to
spring.

"You have given us a hard race. By Jove, you rode magnificently and
climbed heroically. I admire you for it. It is fine to bring down game
like you, Clarenden. You have your uncle's spirit, and a six-foot body
that dwarfs his short stature. And we come as gentlemen only, if we can
deal with a gentleman. It wasn't our men who struck your nun down there.
But if you, young man, dare to show one ounce of fighting spirit now,
behind you on the rocks--don't look--as I lift my hand are my good
friends who will put a bullet into the brain beneath that golden hair,
and you will follow. Being a game-cock cannot help you now. It will only
hasten things. Deliver that girl to me at once, or my men will close in
upon you and no power on earth can save you."

Eloise had sprung to her feet and stood beside me, and both of us knew
the helplessness of our plight. A startling picture it must have been,
and one the cliffs above the San Christobal will hardly see again: