The Stag heard him, and he understood that his victim would escape him.
"Ah!" he shouted wildly, "Die then!"
And raising his scalping knife, he tried to stab her to the heart; but, with a movement swift as thought, Doña Emilia threw herself before the knife which completely disappeared in her throat.
"Thank you, my God!" she exclaimed, as she clung to the arm of the Comanche with a last supreme effort.
At the same moment Clary's sabre descended on the head of the chief, who rolled on the ground with cloven skull, dragging down with him the two females, one of whom was in the death agony, while the other had fainted, but was saved by her mother's heroic devotion. With the assistance of some of his comrades, Oliver raised the captives from the ground.
The battle was at an end; the Comanches had fled, leaving the clearing encumbered with corpses and a number of wounded, whom the implacable warriors set to work dispatching with the cold cruelty of men accustomed to such a task.
"Stay," said Oliver, noticing Running Water lying a few paces from him covered with wounds, "do not kill that man, he is an old acquaintance of mine."
The hunter had placed Doña Diana in her father's arms. Don Aníbal, delighted at seeing his daughter saved, but rendered desperate by the death of his wife, whose agony had already begun, was striving, by all the means in his power, to recall her to life.
"Good-bye," Doña Emilia murmured in a dying voice, as she gently pressed the hands of her daughter and her husband; "our daughter will console you for the loss of me. I die happy, because I died in saving her."
And gently laying her head on her husband's shoulder, she gave back her soul, still trying to smile on those whom she was leaving for ever.