CHAPTER XI.

A DROP IN THE DARK.

"Hark!"

It was Jack who uttered the exclamation.

The shouts were growing louder. Evidently the Mexicans had kept a closer watch than he or Pete had imagined, and had quickly taken alarm at the prolonged absence of their companion.

The boy could hear them battering the oak door of the cell they had so recently occupied.

"Let 'em batter away," muttered Pete. "I shot the bolt on the inside."

To his amazement, Jack actually heard his companion chuckle. What could the cow-puncher be made of, steel or granite, or a combination of both!

And now Pete began to wriggle along the ledge, pressing with all his weight against the wall.

"Come on," he breathed to Jack, "throw all your weight inward and don't look up or down."

In mortal fear of finding his body hurtling backward into vacancy at any moment, the boy followed the intrepid cow-puncher along the narrow footpath. Perhaps it needed more pluck on his part to proceed along the insecure ledge in the pitchy blackness than it did on the part of the nervy cow-puncher. Who shall take the exact measure of courage?

At last they reached the angle of the tower, and Pete stood still. To proceed round the sharp angle, on no wider pathway than that which they trod, would be manifestly impossible. Yet go on they must. Suddenly Pete gave a cry of joy. Looking down into the darkness, he had seen, not more than ten feet beneath them, the sharp ridge of an addition to the old Mission church. If they could reach that he knew, from calculating the height of the tower, they would not be far from the ground.

Behind them the yells and shouts were growing louder.

To think, with Pete, was to act. With a muttered prayer, one of the few he had ever uttered in his rough life, the cow-puncher crouched as well as he could on the ledge. Putting over first one leg and then the other, he deliberately dropped downward, till his hands gripped the edge of the ledge on which a second before he had stood. His muscles cracked as the sudden strain came on them, but he held fast, and a second later let go. He landed to his intense joy, on a rough tiled roof, after an easy drop of not more than four feet.

"Come on," he breathed upward to Jack, who had watched the cow-puncher's daring act with horrified eyes.

"I--I can't," shivered the boy, who, plucky as he was, dreaded the idea of a drop into the dark. "You go on, Pete, and leave me."

"Not much I won't. You make that drop, or I'll give you the biggest hiding you ever had, Jack Merrill, when I get hold of you."

The cowboy had hit on just the words to bring Jack to the proper pitch to take the leap.

"You ain't scared, are you?" whispered up Pete, determined to brace the boy up in the way he knew would prove most effective.

Just as Pete had done a few moments previously, Jack, without a word, knelt for one awful second on the brink of space and then gingerly put over first one leg and then the other. Then followed the same terrible rush into blackness that Pete had experienced, and the same soul-sickening jolt and heart-leap as his fingers gripped, and he hung safe.

"Drop!" snapped Pete.

Jack's fingers obediently unclasped their desperate grip, and he shot downward to be caught in Pete's arms.

"Not so bad when you get used to it," whispered the cow-puncher. "Now then, slide down."

"Slide down--where?"

"This rope. While you were getting ready up there"--even in the dark Jack felt his cheeks flush--"while you were getting ready up there, I fastened that greaser's rope to this old water-spout. All you got to do is to slide down."

A second later Jack flashed down the side of the old church to the ground, where, almost as soon as he had landed, Coyote Pete joined him.

"What now?" asked Jack amazedly. He had never dreamed when they stood on that dizzy tower that in less than ten minutes they would be on firm ground. Nor did he forget how much of the so-far successful escape was due to Coyote Pete's skill and resourcefulness. But the hardest and most dangerous part was yet to come.

Already the whole of the old church was aglow with lights, flashing hither and thither, and outside, shout answered shout from a dozen points of the compass.

"We'll run in the direction where there is the least racket," wisely decided Pete.

"Crouch as low as you can, Jack," he ordered, as, doubled almost in half, he darted off into the darkness.

Imitating his guide as best he could, Jack followed, but as ill-luck would have it, their way led past an old well. In the pitch blackness the boy did not avoid what Pete seemed to have steered clear of by instinct. With a crash that woke the echoes, he blundered headlong into a big pile of tin buckets and pails which had been placed there that day. A bull running amuck in a tin shop could hardly have made more noise.

"My great aunt alkali, you've done it now!" growled Pete, as the terrific crash sounded close behind him.

"Oh, go on, Pete! Go on, and leave me," cried Jack miserably. "I'll only hamper you. Go on by yourself."

"I'll go with you or not at all," was Pete's firm rejoinder. "Come on, now, hurry. They're bound to have heard that, and they'll be 'round here like so many hornets in a minute."

Pete's prophecy proved correct. Hardly had the clanging, clashing echoes of the avalanche of dislodged tinware died out, before they heard Black Ramon's voice shouting:

"Over there! Over there by the well. Fire at them."

Jack did not know much Spanish, but he could comprehend this.

"Fire away," muttered Pete grimly, as they rapidly wormed their way along among the scrub. "You'll not do us any harm by shooting at the well, but you'll drill your rotten tinware full of holes."

But the Mexicans having now recovered from their first excitement, turned their thoughts to other ways of getting back the fugitives than by firing into the darkness after them. To the ears of Jack and Pete was soon borne the trample of horses, and the rattle of galloping hoofs, as Black Ramon's men spread out through the darkness looking for them.

"They're going to form a ring," he whispered, as they squirmed their way along; "that's what they're going to do. They know we are without horses or weapons, and that if they only make the ring large enough they're bound to get us."

On and on they crept, so close to the ground that the burning dust, which had a plentiful ad-mixture of alkali in it, filled their eyes and nose. Pete was more or less used to the stuff, having ridden sometimes for days at a time in it behind herds of cattle or horses, but to Jack the smarting sensation in mouth and nostrils was almost unbearable. The stuff fairly choked him.

Suddenly Pete's hand shot out and gripped Jack's arm with a viselike pressure. Jack interpreted the signal without a word.

"Stop!"

Down they both crouched in the alkali dust among the brush, hardly daring to breathe.

Long before Jack's ears had caught a sound, Pete's quick eye had detected something. He laid his ear to the ground.

"Too dry," he muttered, after holding it there an instant.

Then he drew from his pocket his knife and opened both blades. The larger he thrust into the earth and placed his ear against the smaller bit of steel.

"Just as I thought. Coming this way!" he muttered. "We'll have to lie low and trust to luck."

Presently the trampling that the cowboy's rough-and-ready telegraph had detected became distinctly audible, and against the star-spattered sky Jack saw two black figures on horseback slowly rise up from a hollow. They came into view as slowly as fairies rising to the stage from a trap-door in a theatre.

Neither Pete nor Jack dared to breathe, as the two figures appeared and paused as if undecided which way to go. Suddenly one of them began to speak.

"No sign of 'em in here, amigo. Say ombre, I tell you what--you ride off to the right, and I'll take the left trail. We've covered all the other ground, and that way we're bound to get 'em."

The Mexican grunted something and rode off in the direction the other had indicated.

"It's Jim Cummings, the dern skunk," whispered Coyote Pete to Jack, his indignation at the idea of being hunted by the renegade cowboy getting the better of his prudence.

For one terrible minute Jack thought they had been discovered. Jim Cummings, who had been riding off, stopped his pony abruptly and faced round in the saddle.

"Queer," he said to himself; "thought I heard something. Guess I'll take a look and see if the critters left any trail through hereabouts. I wouldn't trust myself alone with Coyote Pete, but I know he's got no shooting iron, and I reckon this will fetch down a dozen like him, or the kid with him."

He patted his revolver--a big forty-four--as he spoke, and dismounted. Throwing his pony's reins over his head, in plainsman's fashion, the renegade struck a match and bent down toward the ground. He was looking to see if Jack or Coyote Pete had passed that way.

What happened then came so quickly that afterward, when he tried to tell it, Jack never could get the successive incidents arranged clearly in his own mind. All that was audible was a frightened gasp from the renegade as the glare of a match fell on Coyote Pete's face. Wet with sweat, plastered with dust, and disfigured by righteous anger at the renegade, Pete's countenance was indeed one to inspire terror in the person suddenly lighting upon it.

Before the gasp had died out of Jim cummings' throat, and before he could utter the cry that somehow refused to come, Coyote Pete, with a spring like that of a maddened cougar, was on him, and bore him earthward with a mighty crash.

"Take that, you coward, you sneak, you traitor!" he snarled vindictively under his breath, as the unfortunate Jim Cummings struggled and his breath came in sharp wheezes. As he spoke, Coyote Pete, temporarily transformed by rage and scorn to a wild beast, savagely hammered Jim Cummings' head against the ground.

He was recalled to himself by Jack, who, after his first moment of startled surprise, realized that unless he interfered Cummings would in all likelihood be killed.

"Pete, Pete, are you mad?" he gasped, seizing the other's arm and staying it, as the furious cow-puncher was about to bring it crashing down into the renegade's face.

"Mad!" repeated Pete, looking up, "well, I guess so. But I'm glad you brought me to my senses, son. I'd hate to have the blood of such a varmint as this on my conscience."

He rose to his feet, still breathing heavily from his furious outburst.

"Phew! but that did me good," he said, rolling the unconscious Cummings over with a contemptuous foot. "I reckon this coyote won't go hunting his own people with a pack of yellow dogs for a long time to come."

Pete was right, it was many a day before Cummings got over his thrashing, but in the meantime the delay occasioned by Pete's outbreak came near to costing them dear.

A sudden trampling in the darkness behind them made them turn, and they saw dimly the figure of a horseman behind them. The starlight glinted on his rifle barrel as he aimed it at them and covered both the fugitives beyond hope of escape.

"Up your hands!"

The command came from the new arrival in broken, but none the less vigorous and unmistakable English.