They turned an angle of the valley, and came out upon a little flat among the trees.  Toward this open space the Mexican sprang with hoarse, excited cries.  The horses plunged back, snorting.  Yet in the little glade all Was silence, solitude.  Swiftly Franklin and Curly dismounted and made fast their horses, and then followed up the Mexican, their weapons now both drawn.

This glade, now empty, had once held a man, or men.  Here was a trodden place where a horse had been tied to a tree.  Here was the broken end of a lariat.  Here had been a little bivouac, a bed scraped up of the scanty fallen leaves and bunches of taller grass.  Here were broken bushes—­broken, how?  There was the fire, now sunken into a heap of ashes, a long, large, white heap, very large for a cowman’s camp fire.  And there—­

And there was it!  There was some Thing.  There was the reason of this unspoken warning in the air.  There lay the object of their search.  In a flash the revolvers covered the cowering figure of the giant, who, prone upon his knees, was now raving, gibbering, praying, calling upon long-forgotten saints to save him from this sight, “O Santa Maria!  O Purissima!  O Madre de Dios!” he moaned, wringing his hands and shivering as though stricken with an ague.  He writhed among the leaves, his eyes fixed only upon that ghastly shape which lay before him.

There, in the ashes of the dead fire, as though embalmed, as though alive, as though lingering to accuse and to convict, lay the body of Greathouse, the missing man.  Not merely a charred, incinerated mass, the figure lay in the full appearance of life, a cast of the actual man, moulded with fineness from the white ashes of the fire!  Not a feature, not a limb, not a fragment of clothing was left undestroyed; yet none the less here, stretched across the bed of the burned-out fire, with face upturned, with one arm doubled beneath the head and the other with clinched hand outflung, lay the image, the counterpart, nay, the identity of the man they sought!  It was a death mask, wrought by the pity of the destroying flames.  These winds, this sky, the air, the rain, all had spared and left it here in accusation most terrible, in evidence unparalleled, incredibly yet irresistibly true!

Franklin felt his heart stop as he looked upon this sight, and Curly’s face grew pale beneath its tan.  They gazed for a moment quietly, then Curly sighed and stepped back.  “Keep him covered, Cap,” he said, and, going to his horse, he loosened the long lariat.

“Arriba, Juan,” he said quietly.  “Get up.”  He kicked at the Mexican with his foot as he lay, and stirred him into action.  “Get up, Juan,” he repeated, and the giant obeyed meekly as a child.  Curly tied his hands behind his back, took away his knife, and bound him fast to a tree.  Juan offered no resistance whatever, but looked at Curly with wondering dumb protest in his eyes, as of an animal unjustly punished.  Curly turned again to the fire.