. Rifle in hand, he worked over the edge and
lowered himself foot by foot. The rope spun round like a thing alive,
bumped him against the rock wall, twisted in the other direction, and
rubbed his face against the harsh stone. He had no assurance that the
lariat would reach to the foot of the cliff, and as he went jerkily
down, hand under hand, he knew that at any moment he might come to the
end of it and be dashed against the boulders below.

His foot touched loose rubble, and he could see that the face of the
precipice was rooted here in a slope that led down steeply to another
wall. The ledge was like a roof pitched at an extremely acute angle. He
had to get down on hands and knees to keep from sliding to the edge of
the second precipice. At every movement he started small avalanches of
stone and dirt. He crept forward with the utmost caution, dragging the
rifle by his side.

A shot rang out scarcely fifty yards from him, fired from the same ledge
upon which he was crawling.

Had that shot been fired by an Apache or by those whom he had come to
aid?

CHAPTER XL

GURLEY'S GET-AWAY

The boulder cave to which the Apaches had driven Dinsmore and Ramona had
long since been picked out by the outlaws as a defensible position in
case of need. The ledge that ran up to it on the right offered no cover
for attackers. It was scarcely three feet wide, and above and below it
the wall was for practical purposes perpendicular. In anticipation of a
day when his gang might be rounded up by a posse, Pete Dinsmore had gone
over the path and flung down into the gulch every bit of quartz big
enough to shelter a man.

The contour of the rock face back of the big boulders was concave, so
that the defenders were protected from sharpshooters at the edge of the
precipice above.

Another way led up from the bed of the creek by means of a very rough
and broken climb terminating in the loose rubble about the point where
the ledge ran out. This Dinsmore had set Gurley to watch, but it was not
likely that the Indians would reach here for several hours a point
dangerous to the attacked.

Of what happened that day Ramona saw little. She loaded rifles and
pushed them out to Dinsmore from the safety of the cave. Once he had
shouted out to her or to Gurley news of a second successful shot.

"One more good Indian. Hi-yi-yi!" The last was a taunt to the Apaches
hidden below.

There came a time late in the afternoon when the serious a