The remaining two raiders frantically spurred their horses and fled up the valley.  Ladd sent Sol after them.  It seemed to Gale, even though he realized his excitement, that Blanco Sol made those horses seem like snails.  The raiders split, one making for the eastern outlet, the other circling back of the mesquites.  Ladd kept on after the latter.  Then puffs of white smoke and rifle shots faintly crackling told Jim Lash’s hand in the game.  However, he succeeded only in driving the raider back into the valley.  But Ladd had turned the other horseman, and now it appeared the two raiders were between Lash above on the stony slope and Ladd below on the level.  There was desperate riding on part of the raiders to keep from being hemmed in closer.  Only one of them got away, and he came riding for life down under the eastern wall.  Blanco Sol settled into his graceful, beautiful swing.  He gained steadily, though he was far from extending himself.  By Gale’s actual count the raider fired eight times in that race down the valley, and all his bullets went low and wide.  He pitched the carbine away and lost all control in headlong flight.

Some few hundred rods to the left of Gale the raider put his horse to the weathered slope.  He began to climb.  The horse was superb, infinitely more courageous than his rider.  Zigzag they went up and up, and when Ladd reached the edge of the slope they were high along the cracked and guttered rampart.  Once—­twice Ladd raised the long rifle, but each time he lowered it.  Gale divined that the ranger’s restraint was not on account of the Mexican, but for that valiant and faithful horse.  Up and up he went, and the yellow dust clouds rose, and an avalanche rolled rattling and cracking down the slope.  It was beyond belief that a horse, burdened or unburdened, could find footing and hold it upon that wall of narrow ledges and inverted, slanting gullies.  But he climbed on, sure-footed as a mountain goat, and, surmounting the last rough steps, he stood a moment silhouetted against the white sky.  Then he disappeared.  Ladd sat astride Blanco Sol gazing upward.  How the cowboy must have honored that raider’s brave steed!

Gale, who had been too dumb to shout the admiration he felt, suddenly leaped up, and his voice came with a shriek: 

“Look out, Laddy!”

A big horse, like a white streak, was bearing down to the right of the ranger.  Blanco Diablo!  A matchless rider swung with the horse’s motion.  Gale was stunned.  Then he remembered the first raider, the one Lash had shot at and driven away from the outlet.  This fellow had made for the mesquite and had put a saddle on Belding’s favorite.  In the heat of the excitement, while Ladd had been intent upon the climbing horse, this last raider had come down with the speed of the wind straight for the western outlet.  Perhaps, very probably, he did not know Gale was there to block it; and certainly he hoped to pass Ladd and Blanco Sol.