ly at
them as they flashed past. Then a drunken major shouted a challenge from
the doorway of a _cantina_ and began vociferating orders, and as
they left the plaza behind they could hear rising the familiar mob-cry
"_Kill the Gringoes!_"

"If any shooting begins, you women get down in the bottom of the car,"
Davies commanded. "And there's the ferry all right. Be careful,
Charley."

The machine plunged directly down the bank through a cut so deep that it
was more like a chute, struck the gangplank with a terrific bump, and
seemed fairly to leap on board. The ferry was scarcely longer than the
machine, and Drexel, visibly shaken by the closeness of the shave,
managed to stop only when six inches remained between the front wheels
and overboard.

It was a cable ferry, operated by gasoline, and, while Wemple cast off
the mooring lines, Davies was making swift acquaintance with the engine.
The third turn-over started it, and he threw it into gear with the
windlass that began winding up the cable from the river's bottom.

By the time they were in midstream a score of horsemen rode out on the
bank they had just left and opened a scattering fire. The party crowded
in the shelter of the car and listened to the occasional richochet of a
bullet. Once, only, the car was struck.

"Here!--what are you up to!" Wemple demanded suddenly of Drexel, who had
exposed himself to fish a rifle out of the car.

"Going to show the skunks what shooting is," was his answer.

"No, you don't," Wemple said. "We're not here to fight, but to get
this party to Tampico." He remembered Peter Tonsburg's remark. "Whose
business is to live, Charley--that's our business. Anybody can get
killed. It's too easy these days."

Still under fire, they moored at the north shore, and when Davies had
tossed overboard the igniter from the ferry engine and commandeered ten
gallons of its surplus gasoline, they took the steep, soft road up the
bank in a rush.

"Look at her climb," Drexel uttered gleefully. "That Aliso hill won't
bother us at all. She'll put a crimp in it, that's what she'll do."

"It isn't the hill, it's the sharp turn of the zig-zag that's liable to
put a crimp in her," Davies answered. "That road was never laid out for
autos, and no auto has ever been over it. They steamboated this one up."

But trouble came before Aliso was reached. Where the road dipped
abruptly into a small jag of hollow that was almost V-shaped, it arose
out and became