It might be a jaguar or a grizzly only that they scented, if not a hostile man, but, in any case, don Jorge took his safeguards. He hid his horses in the brush, and, crawling to the very brink of the bluff, scrutinised the plain, his finger on the trigger, his ears well opened.
But a quarter of an hour passed, whilst he remained as if moulded out of the clay and merely drying there.
But unexpectedly a tiny black spot under a shining speck which ever accompanied it, flashed on the view afar out of a straggling timberland. Soon the watcher could be sure it was a mounted man, his rifle gleaming, speeding towards him in the maddest haste. He had been clearing obstacles or bursting through them without any daintiness as to his garments, for they were torn by the thorns into tatters, and no doubt the swaying from side to side was as much weakness from loss of blood as the mere dodging to avoid a pursuer's missiles. No one else was perceptible to the young Mexican; but there must have been enemies in the woodland, running along parallel with the fugitive, for, turning without an anticipatory gesture, and stopping his horse with a terrible tug of the Mexican bit, he fired two shots into the cover, bent low, and rode on once more.
"'Tis a white man," observed don Jorge, knitting his brow, "a hunter! Oh, my gracious saint!" he ejaculated, at the height of amazement and pain, "It is none other than don Olivero! I thought he had taken the regular route for the Pass, whilst the Apaches, with our stock, struck off for this trail, and they have met him! I do not need that plumed head to recognise he is the prey of the Apaches now."
He sprang up, regardless of being spied now, and quickly but comprehensively studied the scene.
Oregon Oliver's last two shots had galled the Indians into unusual daring. Three of them, on excellent horses, which the young hacendero might have known as his own, left the wood and sought to keep the hunter in the open, whilst gradually bearing down upon him. As they flanked him it was not easy for him to escape falling victim to one of the three when they saw fit to stop and fire or even risk a snap shot in mid-career.
The Mexican's rifle would not carry that distance. To mount and ride as far around as the steepness of the mountain sides compelled was equally as nugatory.
Instantly a new idea struck him, and he was carrying it out. Drawing his cutlass he severed the lariats of all three horses close to the picket pin, unfastened the other ends at the hobbled hoofs, and spliced the three into one long rope. Securing the last loop round a basalt column which a whale's rush would not have shaken, he flung the loose coils over the edge of the cliff, and, ere the end had fallen into the perpendicular, his machete between his teeth, the brave quick-witted youth was sliding down into the abyss.
There were some twenty feet to drop at the last thong, but he had remarked the crumbling sandstone to be a soft bed and he let go without a pause.
Meanwhile, the American swinging about like a drunken man, seemed in a despairing state. Either his ammunition was exhausted at last, or his only hope was to reserve his final cartridge for the hand-to-hand encounter, but a matter of moments.