it the
better o' us--kill us to a sartinty."

"It's killing me to stay here. Only to think what the ruffians may be
doing at this moment! Adela--"

"Don't gie yur mind to thinkin' o' things now. Keep your thoughts for
what we may do arterward. Yur Adela ain't goin' to be ate up that
quick, nor yet my Concheeter. They'll be tuk away 'long wi' t'others as
prisoners. We kin foller, and trust to some chance o' bein' able to git
'em out o' the clutches o' the scoundrels."

Swayed by his comrade's counsel, somewhat tranquillised by it, Hamersley
resigns himself to stay as they are. Calmer reflection convinces him
there is no help for it. The alternative, for an instant entertained,
would be to rush recklessly on death, going into its very jaws.

They lie along the ground listening, now and then standing up and
peering through the branches at the sentries below. For a long while
they hear nothing save the calls of the card-players, thickly
interlarded with _carajoz, chingaras_, and other blasphemous
expressions. But just after the hour of midnight other sounds reach
their ears, which absorb all their attention, taking it away from the
gamesters.

Up out of the valley, borne upon the buoyant atmosphere, comes the
baying of bloodhounds. In echo it reverberates along the facade of the
cliff, for a time keeping continuous. Soon after a human voice, quickly
followed by a second; these not echoes or repetitions of the same; for
one is the coarse guttural cry of a man, the other a scream in the
shrill treble of of a woman. The first is the shout of surprise uttered
by Chico, the second the shriek of alarm sent forth by Conchita.

With hearts audibly beating, the listeners bend their ears to catch what
may come next, both conjecturing the import of the sounds that have
already reached them, and this with instinctive correctness. Walt is
the first to give speech to his interpretation of it.

"They're at the shanty now," he says, in a whisper. "The two houn's guv
tongue on hearin' 'em approach. That fust shout war from the Injun
Cheeko; and the t'other air hern--my gurl's. Durnation! if they hurt
but a he'r o' her head--Wagh! what's the use o' my threetenin'?"

As if seeing his impotence, the hunter suddenly ceases speech, again
setting himself to listen. Hamersley, without heeding him, is already
in this attitude.

And now out of the valley arise other sounds, not all of them loud. The
stream, here and the