“Gil!” she cried out; and anguish was hers—­a deep, horrible moment of suffering.  It was all up with them.  They were as helpless as Pell had been with the bandit a few hours before.  Caught, ensnared, trapped!

“Why, damn you!” Gilbert screamed, and made a futile lunge for Pell.  But he was too late.  The revolver was leveled at his head.

“Make a fool out of me, will you, you s——­” Pell said, and his eyes glittered.  A snake never looked more venomous.  “I’ve got you now—­got you both, and by God—­”

“He means it, Gil!” Lucia cried, and threw herself into her lover’s arms.  She would die, if he died—­she would die with him.

Pell stepped nearer to his intended victim.  “Our wife is right,” he scoffed.  “It isn’t killing that I mind—­it’s being killed that I object to.”

“They’ll hang you!” Gilbert warned.

Pell smiled his sardonic, evil smile.  “The unwritten law works in Arizona as well as in other places.”  He brutally ordered Lucia to get out of his way.

But Lucia still clung to Gilbert.  “I won’t!  I won’t move!” she yelled, and her voice held the desperation of womankind.

Deliberately Pell said:  “All right!  Then take what’s coming to you and you go to hell together, damn you both!”

He raised the gun and aimed a deadly aim.

Gilbert, in that mad moment, threw Lucia aside, to save her.  He could not let her die with him, much as he hated to leave her with this fiend incarnate.  “You’d better shoot straight,” he cried to Pell.  “Because, by God, if you miss....”  With one wild lunge, he knocked the lamp from the table between them, and there was instant and terrible darkness.

Confused, Pell did not know what to do.  His tongue was cleaving to the roof of his mouth, his hand seemed to freeze on the trigger.

“What the devil!” he called out.  And then a figure appeared miraculously in the alcove, where one candle still burned, shedding a ghostly beam of light from a shelf.  “Good God!”

A shot rang out.  But it was not Pell’s revolver from which it sped.  Morgan Pell crumpled at the feet of Gilbert, and the bandit rushed in, the smoke still coming from his gun.

“Santa Maria del Rio de Guadaloupe!” he cried. “’Ow many time I got for to kill you to-day, any’ow?  Now, damn to ’ell, mebbe you stay dead a while, eh?” He looked down at the shriveled form.  And as of old he called to his henchman, “Pedro!”

And Pedro was there. “Si!” he said.

“Did I not tell you for kill zis man?” said Lopez, pointing in disgust to Morgan Pell.

Swiftly in Spanish, and frightened almost out of his wits, poor Pedro muttered something wholly unintelligible.

“Ees bum shooting!  If she ’appen some more, zen I ’ave for get new Pedro.  Should be too bad.  Especially for you.  You onnerstand?”

Terrified at the thought, poor Pedro simply shivered. “Si,” he whispered.