“The chapel!  The chapel!  We must run to that now,” cried Sister Anita.

Her long veil was streaming back in the wind, and her rosary and crucifix beating about her shoulders with the hard riding, but her white face was brave with a divine trust.  Yet even as she urged us I saw how imposible was her plea, for the men in front were already nearer to the place than we were.  At the same time a pony dashed up beside me, and Little Blue Flower’s voice rang in my ears.

“The rocks!  Climb up and hide in the rocks!” She dropped back on one side of Beverly, with Sister Anita on the other, guarding our rear.  As I turned our flight toward the cliff, I caught sight of an Indian in a wedge of rock just across the river, and I heard the singing flight of an arrow behind me, followed almost instantly by another arrow.  I looked back to see Sister Anita’s pony staggering and rearing in agony, with Little Blue Flower trying vainly to catch its bridle-rein, and Sister Anita, clutching wildly at her rosary, a great stream of blood flowing from an arrow wound in her neck.

Men think swiftly in moments like these.  The impulse to halt, and the duty to press on for the protection of the girl beside me, holding me in doubt.  Instantly I saw the dark crew, with Ferdinand Ramero leading fiercely forward, almost upon us, and I heard Beverly Clarenden’s voice filling the valley—­“Run, Gail, run!  You can beat ’em up there.”

It was a cry of insistences and assurances and power, and withal there was that minor tone of sympathy which had sounded in the boy’s defiant voice long ago in the gray-black shadows below Pawnee Rock, when his chivalric soul had been stirred by the cruel wrongs of Little Blue Flower and he had cried: 

“Uncle Esmond, let’s take her, and take our chances.”

I knew in a flash that the three behind us were cut off, and Eloise St. Vrain and I pressed on alone.  We crossed the narrow strip of rising ground to where the first rocks lay as they had fallen from the cliff above, split off by some titanic agony of nature.  Up and up we went, our ponies stumbling now and then, but almost as surefooted as men, as they climbed the narrow way.  Now the rocks hid us from the plain as we crept sturdily through narrow crevices, and now we clambered up an open path where nothing concealed our way.  But higher still and higher, foot, by foot we pressed, while with oath and growl behind us came our pursuers.

At last we could ride no farther, and the miracle was that our ponies could have climbed so far.  Above us huge slabs of stone, by some internal cataclysm hurled into fragments of unguessed tons of weight, seemed poised in air, about to topple down upon the plain below.  Between these wild, irregular masses a narrow footing zigzagged upward to still other wild, irregular masses, a footing of long leaps in cramped spaces between sharp edges of upright clefts, all gigantic, unbending, now shielding by their immense angles, now standing sheer and stark before us, casting no shadows to cover us from the great white glare of the New-Mexican day.