“Oh!” she gasped, out of breath and almost faint.  “Oh, how it has frightened me!”

“And it was all of no use,” he answered, passing her arm into his and supporting her.

“No.  Poor Pepita!  Poor little Pepita!  But oh, what an escape you had!”

“We can only hope that they will adopt her into the tribe,” he said in answer to the first phrase, while he timidly pressed her arm to thank her for the second.

Coronado now came up, ignorant of Texas Smith’s misadventure, and puzzled at the escape of Thurstane, but as fluent and complimentary as usual.

“My dear Lieutenant!  Language is below my feelings.  I want to kneel down and worship you.  You ought to have a statue—­yes, and an altar.  If your humanity has not been successful, it has been all the same glorious.”

“Nonsense,” answered Thurstane.  “Every one of us has done well in his turn!  It was my tour of duty to-day.  Don’t praise me.  I haven’t accomplished anything.”

“Ah, the scoundrels!” declaimed Coronado.  “How could they violate a truce!  It is unknown, unheard of.  The miserable traitors!  I wish you could have killed Manga Colorada.”

From this dialogue he hurried away to find and catechise Texas Smith.  The desperado told his story:  “Jest got a bead on him—­had him sure pop—­never see a squarer mark—­when somebody mounted me—­pitched me clean out of my hole.”

“Who?” demanded Coronado, a rim of white showing clear around his black pupils.

“Dunno.  Didn’t see nobody.  ’Fore I could reload and git in it was gone.”

“What the devil did you stop to reload for?”

“Stranger, I allays reload.”

Coronado flinched under the word stranger and the stare which accompanied it.

“It was a woman’s yell,” continued Texas.

Coronado felt suddenly so weak that he sat down on a mouldering heap of adobes.  He thought of Clara; was it Clara?  Jealous and terrified, he for an instant, only for an instant, wished she were dead.

“See here,” he said, when he had restrung his nerves a little.  “We must separate.  If there is any trouble, call on me.  I’ll stand by you.”

“I reckon you’d better,” muttered Smith, looking at Coronado as if he were already drawing a bead on him.

Without further talk they parted.  The Texan went off to rub down his horse, mend his accoutrements, squat around the cooking fires, and gamble with the drivers.  Perhaps he was just a bit more fastidious than usual about having his weapons in perfect order and constantly handy; and perhaps too he looked over his shoulder a little oftener than common while at his work or his games; but on the whole he was a masterpiece of strong, serene, ferocious self-possession.  Coronado also, as unquiet at heart as the devil, was outwardly as calm as Greek art.  They were certainly a couple of almost sublime scoundrels.

It was now nightfall; the day closed with extraordinary abruptness; the sun went down as though he had been struck dead; it was like the fall of an ox under the axe of the butcher.  One minute he was shining with an intolerable, feverish fervor, and the next he had vanished behind the lofty ramparts of the plateau.