"Up!" said Oliver in this silence.
They had the abrupt side to climb when they would be beside the amateur artillerists. After what they had overcome this affair was merely one of time. The brink of the barranca was armed by stony mounds and the wrecks of half a dozen pines of the giant species, which must have been an imposing sight for miles around before the lightning or the tempest shattered them. Ensconced in this natural barricade, not more than three hundred feet from the nearest of the foe, they could easily take the repose they deserved, whilst studying the scene and the actors.
On their front, to the right, the hacienda and its corrals, into which they could gaze across the gully; farther away the forest where the Mexican detachment lay. Beside them, the hill covered with the insurgents, and more and still more of them in the vales. Disseminated thus, they seemed a veritable swarm of locusts, such as covers the plains of Arizona and Colorado.
They recognised without difficulty Captain Pedrillo on his horse, with his wooden leg sticking out and twitching free of the stirrup; the Apache chiefs, knowing nothing about ordnance, left the Mexicans to manage the loading of the cannon with blasting powder. A pile of the powder cans, some partly open and some altogether stove in and lidless, with all the carelessness of the inexperienced, stood near the piece on its wooden frame; at that distance the Englishman could even see the brand on the tins of the sun in glory of the Rayo del Sol Mining Company, from the works of which, by Regulus Pueblo, they had been taken by its truant ore carriers.
Darkness fell, deeper than usually, which confirmed Oliver in his forecast as to a tempest approaching, but the peons worked on at the clumsy pedestal of the cannon by the flare of torches.
Seeing that the piece would surely be in place, Captain Pedrillo, Iron Shirt, and the Apache subchiefs went into a large tent on the brow of the hill. It was open on the face towards the hacienda above, and consequently they were no longer visible to the two adventurers, who could see only the guard of Indians at the same point.
[CHAPTER XXIV.]
THE UNWILLING VOLUNTEER.
It had fallen a very black night, we say. Not a star peeped out among the heavy clouds grazing the treetops and rim of the bowl in the centre of which Monte Tesoro flaunted its defiant colours. In the northward, long peals of thunder rolled without any lightning being visible.