en blindness--to faint
as Thorne had fainted. But he was transfixed to the spot with eyes
that pierced the red light.
Mercedes was growing weaker, seemed about to collapse.
"Oh, Jim Lash, are you dead?" cried Gale. "Oh, Laddy!... Oh, Yaqui!"
Suddenly a dark form literally fell down the wall behind the ledge
where Rojas fought the girl. It sank in a heap, then bounded erect.
"Yaqui!" screamed Gale, and he waved his bleeding hands till the blood
bespattered his face. Then he choked. Utterance became impossible.
The Indian bent over Rojas and flung him against the wall. Mercedes,
sinking back, lay still. When Rojas got up the Indian stood between
him and escape from the ledge. Rojas backed the other way along the
narrowing shelf of lava. His manner was abject, stupefied. Slowly he
stepped backward.
It was then that Gale caught the white gleam of a knife in Yaqui's
hand. Rojas turned and ran. He rounded a corner of wall where the
footing was precarious. Yaqui followed slowly. His figure was dark
and menacing. But he was not in a hurry. When he passed off the ledge
Rojas was edging farther and farther along the wall. He was clinging
now to the lava, creeping inch by inch. Perhaps he had thought to work
around the buttress or climb over it. Evidently he went as far as
possible, and there he clung, an unscalable wall above, the abyss
beneath.
The approach of the Yaqui was like a slow dark shadow of gloom. If it
seemed so to the stricken Gale what must it have been to Rojas? He
appeared to sink against the wall. The Yaqui stole closer and closer.
He was the savage now, and for him the moment must have been glorified.
Gale saw him gaze up at the great circling walls of the crater, then
down into the depths. Perhaps the red haze hanging above him, or the
purple haze below, or the deep caverns in the lava, held for Yaqui
spirits of the desert, his gods to whom he called. Perhaps he invoked
shadows of his loved ones and his race, calling them in this moment of
vengeance.
Gale heard--or imagined he heard--that wild, strange Yaqui cry.
Then the Indian stepped close to Rojas, and bent low, keeping out of
reach. How slow were his motions! Would Yaqui never--never end it?...
A wail drifted across the crater to Gale's ears.
Rojas fell backward and plunged sheer. The bank of white choyas caught
him, held him upon their steel spikes. How long did the dazed Gale sit
there watching Rojas wrestli
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