n an' for
you to take the other. We might hear something."

"Sounds reasonable," agreed Wadley.

The cattleman turned to the left, the Ranger to the right. Roberts rode
at a slow trot, stopping every few minutes to listen for any noise that
might rise from the gulch.

His mind was full of pictures of the girl, one following another
inconsequently. They stabbed him poignantly. He had a white dream of her
moving down the street at Tascosa with step elastic, the sun sparkling
in her soft, wavy hair. Another memory jumped to the fore of her on the
stage, avoiding with shy distress the advances of the salesman he had
jolted into his place. He saw her grave and gay, sweet and candid and
sincere, but always just emerging with innocent radiance from the
chrysalis of childhood.

Her presence was so near, she was so intimately close, that more than
once he pulled up under an impression that she was calling him.

It was while he was waiting so, his weight resting easily in the saddle,
that out of the night there came to him a faint, far-away cry of
dreadful agony. The sound of it shook Jack to the soul. Cold beads of
perspiration stood out on his forehead. Gooseflesh ran down his spine.
His hand trembled. The heart inside his ribs was a heavy weight of ice.
Though he had never heard it before, the Ranger knew that awful cry for
the scream of a man in torment. The Apaches were torturing a captured
prisoner.

If Dinsmore had been captured by them the chances were that 'Mona had
been taken, too, unless he had given her the horse and remained to hold
the savages back.

Roberts galloped wildly along the edge of the rift. Once again he heard
that long-drawn wail of anguish and pulled up his horse to listen, the
while he shook like a man with a heavy chill.

Before the sound of it had died away a shot echoed up the canon to him.
His heart seemed to give an answering lift of relief. Some one was still
holding the Apaches at bay. He fired at once as a message that help was
on the way.

His trained ear told him that the rifle had been fired scarcely a
hundred yards below him, apparently from some ledge of the cliff well up
from the bottom of the gulch. It might have come from the defenders or
it might have been a shot fired by an Apache. Jack determined to find
out.

He unfastened the _tientos_ of his saddle which held the lariat. A scrub
oak jutted up from the edge of the cliff and to this he tied securely
one end of the rope