"Out!" shouted Oliver, flinging the door open. "And you come, too, unless you like to be boiled in your own spirits."
For with one kick beating in a full cask, he fired the pouring alcohol with the nearest lamp, and pushed Gladsden and the daughter of don Benito out of the door. A vast sheet of flame rose in their rear, and while Camote leaped through it, a fearful explosion in that circumscribed apartment denoted that another cask had burst, and was contributing to the flames. The innkeeper's assistants were unable to pass the burning fluid, and their appeals for help made the pinioned warrior smile with fiendish glee.
He began his death song in a strong voice, though the blazing liquor, red, violet, and blue, gradually rolled towards him in his helpless state, with little or no smoke to muffle the rays.
Through half a dozen stragglers the three fugitives made their way, the hunter literally bearing them down before his rush, whilst the Englishman was as little impeded by half carrying the Mexican maiden on his left arm. However, the cluster of horses was reached, held in the usual manner by all the bridles being passed over one, which two youthful warriors, who had probably never fleshed the scalping knife, were chafing at being detained there to hold. Besides them a stalwart Indian, whose flattened features hinted at the admixture of African blood, was on guard. Luckily he had fired all but his last shot in the skirmishing, and he had only one arrow left in hand. With that he sprang forward to meet the flying trio, using it as a stabbing weapon.
Generously renouncing the use of his firearms, with that sometimes imprudent pride of the Caucasian who loves to win at fair play, the hunter flew at him with merely his own steel blade.
Whilst Gladsden smote the two striplings to the right and left, and was choosing two of the startled and frightened horses for the girl and himself, Oliver was engaged in a terrible, deadly, and pitiless combat with his sworn enemy. They had grappled one another with veritable hooks of steel, and sought mutually to overthrow and stab. Their eyes flashed fire, they wasted their breath in taunts and revelations of the many deeds of mischief and death which they had respectively wrought among their opposing people, till their bated breath came but feebly through their grinding teeth. But for their speech in broken accents, they were scarcely human—mere wild beasts bent on rending and tearing one another till "the heart was bare."
"Oh, you air Mr. Rough-on-the-Herdsman, you air?" hissed Oregon Oliver, tightening a hug which the grizzly would not have disdained to borrow. "Well, Mr. Death-to-the-Cowboys, how like you that? You've 'rubbed out' three solitary trappers, ha' you? How's that for a rub?—And that, and, still again, that!" And hurling the wretch to the earth under the curveting mustangs' unshod hoofs, he nearly beat the last breath out of his wretched and bleeding body. In a moment he rose, this time not ashamed to tear away the reeking scalp of the Indian who had in his boasts touched on a painful chord.
"I bet my life," muttered he, seizing a horse by the nostrils, and dragging his head down irresistibly, "that señor Murder-the-Vaqueros will wipe out no more lone trappers, durn his carcass—would he were roasting alongside his chief! Innyhow, he can't fall, scalpless, in among his brethren in the happy hunting grounds!"
All three were mounted now, a task which would have been far more difficult only for the horses which Mr. Gladsden had selected being by chance stolen from the Mexicans, and, hence, rather pleased than alarmed at instinctively recognising hands more familiar than their last masters'.
The two Apache boys were crawling away for refuge in the corral cactus; thence to recover from the blows, and hurl insults and stones.