It was quite a young girl for age, but being precocious, like all tropical creatures, a woman in development, she looked only too lovely in such a miserably unfit scene, fragile yet exuberant, with fine, tiny hands and feet, and narrow waist, black eyes, fair creamy skin and carnation lips; her very step seemed not to press the ground. In her ears and around her neck were pearls of unwonted dimensions; but it was evidently her character and her beauty which had won her the title of "La Perla Purísima."
At the same moment a distant fusillade was audible.
"Follow, and do as I do!" shouted Oliver, taking his decision with that swiftness of the prairie expert, which is, perhaps, the predominant trait that most bewilders the savages, trained to do no act without the warrant of magical manifestations.
With all possible speed he flung himself forward and dashed the Indian to the right of him as far aloof as the walls, at the same time throwing his left arm in a backhanded way around the Mexican señorita's waist so that, in drawing her forward, she was immediately pushed behind him.
Gladsden—on whom the sight of the lovely girl had had a profound effect—had also sprung forward, and not exactly imitating the hunter, pushed with his gun muzzle at a second Apache, and, whether intentionally or not, firing at the same instant, a hole was actually blown through the wretch, who leaped up in the air convulsively and so received a terrible cut of the hatchet of Tiger Cat, aimed at his slayer.
"You've made your coo'! Now kick the rest of them right clean out!" roared Oliver, stooping to avoid a pistol shot, and, in rising with a heavy stool in his hand, breaking the collarbone of the man who had shot. "Now thar, Caballeros of the bluest blood," he shouted derisively, "do something, only do something, if you want to sleep another night in your hide!"
But already the two remaining Apaches had recoiled into the doorway, encumbered with the dead body of their brother whose scalp they wished to save, and Tiger Cat alone really confronted the whites.
This seeing, Tío Camote broke the spell of terror that had converted him into a mere statue on his counter, and snatching a cutlass from between two casks, smacked the boards with it to make an encouraging noise, calling out to his aids:
"Upon them, and second those valorous foreigners!"
Tiger Cat, enraged at the captive being so swiftly snatched out of his power, levelled a gun at the poor frightened thing over Oliver's shoulder. But already Gladsden had the Apache on the flank, and being too near him to use his rifle as a club, shifted it into his left hand, and dealt the redskin a terrible fisticuff. Staggered at this unusual blow from a weapon not in Indian war practice, the chief reeled and fell into the embrace of the white hunter.