“This way!” Thurstane continued to shout.  “Forward, you women; up the hill with you.  Steady, men.  Face the enemy.  Don’t throw away a shot.  Steady with the firing.  Steady!”

The hostile parties were already thirty or forty yards apart; and the emigrants, drawing loosely up the slope, were increasing the distance.  Manga Colorada spurred to the front of his people, shaking his lance and yelling for a charge.  Only half a dozen followed him; his horse fell almost immediately under a rifle ball; one of the braves picked up the chief and bore him away; the rest dispersed, prancing and curveting.  The opportunity for mingling with the emigrants and destroying them in a series of single combats was lost.

Evidently the Apaches, and their mustangs still more, were unfit for fight.  The forty-eight hours of hunger and thirst, and the prodigious burst of one hundred and twenty miles up and down rugged terraces, had nearly exhausted their spirits as well as their strength, and left them incapable of the furious activity necessary in a cavalry battle.  The most remarkable proof of their physical and moral debilitation was that in all this melee not more than a dozen of them had discharged an arrow.

If they would not attack they must retreat, and that speedily.  At fifty yards’ range, armed only with bows and spears, they were at the mercy of riflemen and could stand only to be slaughtered.  There was a hasty flight, scurrying zigzag, right and left, rearing and plunging, spurring the last caper out of their mustangs, the whole troop spreading widely, a hundred marks and no good one.  Nevertheless Texas Smith’s miraculous aim brought down first a warrior and then a horse.

By the time the Apaches were out of range the emigrants were well up the slope of the hill which occupied the extreme elbow of the bend in the river.  It was a bluff or butte of limestone which innumerable years had converted into marl, and for the most part into earth.  A thin turf covered it; here and there were thickets; more rarely trees.  Presently some one remarked that the sides were terraced.  It was true; there were the narrow flats of soil which had once been gardens; there too were the supporting walls, more or less ruinous.  Curious eyes now turned toward the seeming mound on the summit, querying whether it might not be the remains of an antique pueblo.

At this instant Clara uttered a cry of anxiety, “Where is Pepita?”

The girl was gone; a hasty looking about showed that; but whither?  Alas! the only solution to this enigma must be the horrible word, “Apaches.”  It seemed the strangest thing conceivable; one moment with the party, and the next vanished; one moment safe, and the next dead or doomed.  Of course the kidnapping must have been accomplished during the frenzied riot in the stream, when the two bands were disentangling amid an uproar of plungings, yells, and musket shots.  The girl had probably been stunned by a blow, and then either left to float down the brook or dragged off by some muscular warrior.