Doña Clara, with her head stretched forward, seemed to be anxiously listening to the noises outside. Two paces from her, the squatter's wife was dying; a bullet had passed through her skull. On seeing Red Cedar, the maiden folded her arms on her bosom, and wailed.
"Voto a Dios!" the brigand exclaimed. "She is still here. Follow me, señora, we must be off."
"No," the Spaniard answered, resolutely. "I will not go."
"Come, child, obey; do not oblige me to employ violence; time is precious."
"I will not go, I tell you," the maiden repeated.
"For the last time, will you follow me—yes or no?"
Doña Clara shrugged her shoulders. The squatter saw that any discussion was useless, and he must settle the question by force; so, leaping over the corpse of his wife, he tried to seize the girl. But the latter, who had watched all his movements, bounded like a startled fawn, drew a dagger from her breast, and with flashing eye, quivering nostrils, and trembling lips, she prepared to go through a desperate struggle.
There must be an end of this, so the squatter raised his sabre, and with the flat dealt such a terrible blow on the girl's delicate arm, that she let the dagger fall, and uttered a shriek of pain. But the unhappy girl stooped at once to pick up her weapon with her left hand; Red Cedar took advantage of this movement, bounded upon her, and made her a girdle of his powerful arms. The maiden, who had hitherto resisted in silence, shrieked with all the energy of despair—
"Help, Shaw, help!"
"Ah!" Red Cedar howled; "he, then, was the traitor! Let him come, if he dare."