How horribly plain that fiend’s intention!  Gale tried to close his eyes, but could not.  He prayed wildly for a sudden blindness —­to faint as Thorne had fainted.  But he was transfixed to the spot with eyes that pierced the red light.

Mercedes was growing weaker, seemed about to collapse.

“Oh, Jim Lash, are you dead?” cried Gale.  “Oh, Laddy!...Oh, Yaqui!”

Suddenly a dark form literally fell down the wall behind the ledge where Rojas fought the girl.  It sank in a heap, then bounded erect.

“Yaqui!” screamed Gale, and he waved his bleeding hands till the blood bespattered his face.  Then he choked.  Utterance became impossible.

The Indian bent over Rojas and flung him against the wall.  Mercedes, sinking back, lay still.  When Rojas got up the Indian stood between him and escape from the ledge.  Rojas backed the other way along the narrowing shelf of lava.  His manner was abject, stupefied.  Slowly he stepped backward.

It was then that Gale caught the white gleam of a knife in Yaqui’s hand.  Rojas turned and ran.  He rounded a corner of wall where the footing was precarious.  Yaqui followed slowly.  His figure was dark and menacing.  But he was not in a hurry.  When he passed off the ledge Rojas was edging farther and farther along the wall.  He was clinging now to the lava, creeping inch by inch.  Perhaps he had thought to work around the buttress or climb over it.  Evidently he went as far as possible, and there he clung, an unscalable wall above, the abyss beneath.

The approach of the Yaqui was like a slow dark shadow of gloom.  If it seemed so to the stricken Gale what must it have been to Rojas?  He appeared to sink against the wall.  The Yaqui stole closer and closer.  He was the savage now, and for him the moment must have been glorified.  Gale saw him gaze up at the great circling walls of the crater, then down into the depths.  Perhaps the red haze hanging above him, or the purple haze below, or the deep caverns in the lava, held for Yaqui spirits of the desert, his gods to whom he called.  Perhaps he invoked shadows of his loved ones and his race, calling them in this moment of vengeance.

Gale heard—­or imagined he heard—­that wild, strange Yaqui cry.

Then the Indian stepped close to Rojas, and bent low, keeping out of reach.  How slow were his motions!  Would Yaqui never—­never end it?...A wail drifted across the crater to Gale’s ears.

Rojas fell backward and plunged sheer.  The bank of white choyas caught him, held him upon their steel spikes.  How long did the dazed Gale sit there watching Rojas wrestling and writhing in convulsive frenzy?  The bandit now seemed mad to win the delayed death.

When he broke free he was a white patched object no longer human, a ball of choya burrs, and he slipped off the bank to shoot down and down into the purple depths of the crater.