Kidd made a contemptuous gesture, turned, and leisurely led the way over the few score yards between the swamp's edge and the lovely outskirts of an ever vernal wood. Already they caught glimpses of startled but unterrified wild animals under beautiful boughs, fruit laden, staring incredulously at the bloodstained, smoke blackened strangers.
All at once they felt an excessive rise in temperature. They began streaming with perspiration, and their wounds re-opened and bled profusely. At each step a hollow sound arose. Then one foot, heavier than another, sank as in a crust of snow in a calcareous soil. It was no sooner drawn forth than the other was worse embogged, and those who came to their comrade's help began to be mired. Kidd stopped; he looked round to order a change of route, when a scream of terror burst from his and every lip, frightening the animals into flight and curdling the blood of the observers at the canyon's mouth. Margottet, both feet entangled, had broken bodily through the unsafe surface, and where he had been sucked down a flaming dust had been belched up, exactly as when demons vanish down a trap on the stage.
With one accord, like men do instinctively upon thin ice, the wretches threw themselves flat on the ground. With the same impulse—an unaccountable one, stronger than mere interest in their disappeared comrade—all heads were turned to the gap where he had found a gateway to death. Blinded at first, their vision became accustomed to the radiance that emanated from within. It seemed to them that they peered into a chasm where a lake of pure glowing fire slowly moved in sullen upheaval. Meanwhile, the heat increased. They were like men who had crept into a limekiln for warmth, and by mischance were stupefied by the fumes and were being roasted. They rolled away hither and thither, only thinking to avoid contact, for the weight of two bodies concentrated on one space might cause the repetition of Margottet's fate. Their hair and beards were singed, their wounds were dried up now and cauterised. They shrieked for help and mercy and that they would surrender. Then unendurable anguish made them swoon. And helplessly they were dragged thence by the lassoes of the Mexicans, who ventured into the swamp to execute their deliverance this way.
"One of the wonders of the Yellowstone, gentlemen," said Jim Ridge. "I never try to enter the Park that road."
"A manifestation of the Spirit of Fire," said Red Knife. "Where the spirits of our fathers rove in enjoyment no such evil things could be allowed to enter."
All was ended here. Leaving the miserable bandits to be brought on at leisure, the chiefs retraced their steps to ascertain before nightfall how the detachment sent to attack or outwit the reserve of gold grabbers had executed their task. The column of smoke thence arising must have a meaning.
The women's camp was in a flutter. Not only had all seen white jets of smoke from the firearms on the opposite slope, amid patches of green, brown, and grey, but Joe had, in passing among the captives, acquainted Miss Maclan with the news that the final moment had come. Now or never the joined forces of mongrels and ruffians were to be crushed on the sill of the Yellowstone Region.
Suddenly Miss Maclan beckoned several of the more energetic women to her side. Ferreting in one of the wagons, she had discovered packages of weapons: there were cutlasses enough to arm all of them.
But hardly had she ranged the Amazons in defence before the war whoop of the Cherokee split all ears as he and his band clambered upon the plateau. It needed no more to start the ruffians into a rout, and those deliverers not gone in hot pursuit were being thanked by the tearful women.
In three days the victors had reposed from the strife, and the red men feasted. In that period, too, the strange force from the north arrived, being a band of Mormon "destroying angels," or police, in search of the slayer of Gideon Kidd. Their captain was added to the tribunal formed to try Kidd and Steelder, Jim's prisoner, sole survivors of the gold grabbers' corps.