No sooner had El Capitan struck it squarely with his four hoofs, than he reared and, whirling, sprang back to the solid earth.  The suddenness of his retreat had all but thrown Chesterton, but he regained his seat, and digging the pony roughly with his spurs, pulled his head again toward the bridge.

“What are you shying at, now?” he panted.  “That’s a perfectly good bridge.”

For a minute horse and man struggled for the mastery, the horse spinning in short circles, the man pulling, tugging, urging him with knees and spurs.  The first round ended in a draw.  There were two more rounds with the advantage slightly in favor of El Capitan, for he did not approach the bridge.

The night was warm and the exertion violent.  Chesterton, puzzled and annoyed, paused to regain his breath and his temper.  Below him, in the ravine, the shallow waters of the ford called to him, suggesting a pleasant compromise.  He turned his eyes downward and saw hanging over the water what appeared to be a white bird upon the lower limb of a dead tree.  He knew it to be an orchid, an especially rare orchid, and he knew, also, that the orchid was the favorite flower of Miss Armitage.  In a moment he was on his feet, and with the reins over his arm, was slipping down the bank, dragging El Capitan behind him.  He ripped from the dead tree the bark to which the orchid was clinging, and with wet moss and grass packed it in his leather camera case.  The camera he abandoned on the path.  He always could buy another camera; he could not again carry a white orchid, plucked in the heart of the tropics on the night peace was declared, to the girl he left behind him.  Followed by El Capitan, nosing and snuffing gratefully at the cool waters, he waded the ford, and with his camera case swinging from his shoulder, galloped up the opposite bank and back into the trail.

A minute later, the bridge, unable to recover from the death blow struck by El Capitan, went whirling into the ravine and was broken upon the rocks below.  Hearing the crash behind him, Chesterton guessed that in the jungle a tree had fallen.

They had started at six in the afternoon and had covered twenty of the forty miles that lay between Adhuntas and Mayaguez, when, just at the outskirts of the tiny village of Caguan, El Capitan stumbled, and when he arose painfully, he again fell forward.

Caguan was a little church, a little vine-covered inn, a dozen one-story adobe houses shining in the moonlight like whitewashed sepulchres.  They faced a grass-grown plaza, in the centre of which stood a great wooden cross.  At one corner of the village was a corral, and in it many ponies.  At the sight Chesterton gave a cry of relief.  A light showed through the closed shutters of the inn, and when he beat with his whip upon the door, from the adobe houses other lights shone, and white-clad figures appeared in the moonlight.  The landlord of the inn was a Spaniard, fat and prosperous-looking, but for the