ely. "One hundred pesos to the man who kills either of them or
captures her."

Steve answered this by firing twice, once with his revolver and almost
immediately afterward with his rifle. Ochampa sat down suddenly. He had
been hit in the leg.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE PRISONER

Pasquale changed his tactics. Having located his prey with fair
accuracy, he spread his men so as to converge upon the fugitives as the
spokes of a wheel do toward the hub. His instructions were that the men
were not to fire unless they were within close enough range to be sure
not to hit the girl.

His courage had been tested often enough to be beyond doubt, so Gabriel
contented himself with waiting behind his horse for the captives to be
brought to him. He had no intention of being killed in a skirmish of
this kind as long as he had peons to send forward in his place.

"Bet five dollars gold I have them inside of a quarter of an hour,
captain," the Mexican general said, peering across his saddle toward the
grove.

"Yes," assented Major Ochampa in a depressed voice. He objected to
having camp vagrants take liberties with his leg. "Hope you make an
example of them, general."

Pasquale turned, his eyes like cold lights on a frosty night. "They'll
pray for death a hundred times before it comes to them," he promised
brutally. Then, with quick surprise, "Where's Holcomb?"

"He went forward with the men."

"Just like him," replied Gabriel, shrugging his shoulders. "The madman
must always be in the thick of it. It's the Gringo way."

From his mesquite thicket Yeager kept up as rapid a fire as possible,
using rifle and revolver alternately so as to deceive the enemy into
believing the whole party was there. His object was merely to gain time
for his escaping friends. Ochampa had been wounded as an object lesson,
but he did not intend to kill any of those who were surrounding him. If
there had been a dozen of them he would have fought it out to a finish,
but with one against a thousand he felt it would be useless murder to
kill.

Steve fired into the air, knowing that would do just as well to delay
the attackers. Each time he fired his revolver he called aloud softly to
himself the number of the shot. It was essential to his plan that there
should be one bullet left the moment before they took him.

He could hear them stumbling toward him through the brush and could make
out the dark figures as they crawled forward.

"Four," he counte