incautious moment had waved above the rocks.

"It is the end, then," said Patricia.

"Yes, it is the end. We have beaten them back for the moment, but
presently they will find that all we could do we have done, and then--"

She left her post beside the gap in the front, and came and knelt beside
him, and he took her in his arms.

"It is not Death before us, but Life," she said in a low voice.

"It is God and Love, naught else," he answered. "But the river between
will be bitter for you to cross, sweetheart."

"We cross it together," she said, "and so--" She raised her head that he
might see her radiant smile, and their lips met.

"Hark!" she said directly with her hand on his. "What is that sound?"

He shook his head. "The wind has risen, and the forest rustles and
sighs. There is nothing more."

"It is far off," she answered, "but it is like the dip of oars. Ah!"

Over against them, framed in the narrow opening between the rocks, his
lithe, half-nude figure dark against the crimson west, and with a smile
upon his evil lips and in his evil eyes, stood Luiz Sebastian. In the
dead silence that succeeded he looked with a smiling; countenance from
the musket, now useless and thrown aside, to his enemy, wounded and
unarmed save for a knife, and to the woman in that enemy's arms; then,
without turning, he said a few words in an Indian tongue. From the dusky
mass behind him came one short, wild cry of savage triumph, followed by
another dead silence.

Still holding Patricia in one arm, Landless rose from his knee, and
stood confronting him.

"We are met again, Senor Landless," said Luiz Sebastian smoothly.
Receiving no answer, he spoke again with a tigerish expansion of his
thick lips. "You have had an accident, I see. Mother of God! that foot
must pain you! But you will forget it presently in the pleasure of the
pine splinters."

"I will forget it in the pleasure of this," said Landless, releasing
Patricia, and springing upon the mulatto with a suddenness and violence
that sent them both staggering through the opening between the rocks,
out upon the narrow plateau and into the ring of Ricahecrians. Luiz
Sebastian was strong, with the easy masked strength of the panther, but
Landless had the strength of despair. The mulatto, thrown heavily to the
ground, and pinned there by his adversary's knee, saw the gleam of the
lifted knife, and would have seen nothing more in this life, but that a
woman's cry rang out and