"What's that?" demanded Mr. Day again, wide awake.
Marty rolled off his couch and appeared in the light of the smoky lantern, the snub-nosed revolver in his hand. "Hey! I'm in this!" he croaked, but half awake. "What's doing?"
Swiftly Janice told them what little she had learned while she crammed things into her bag. The man at the door urged haste.
"That Gomez—he is near," sputtered the messenger.
"Why, we know that feller," Marty drawled. "I don't think he'd do anything to us, would he, Janice?"
"Never trust appearances with these Mexican banditti," said Mr. Day gravely. "I've shared the contents of his tobacco pouch with one and then had him try to cut my throat the next day. They are light-hearted, light-fingered and—lightest of all in their morals. I wonder that you two got away from Gomez as you did."
"And Tom Hotchkiss got away from him, too, did he?" growled Marty. "Well, that's too bad."
"Come, señor!" urged the messenger in the doorway.
They hurried to the headquarters car. It was growing lighter in the east. The rifle fire on the southern edge of the mesa was becoming sharper. General De Soto Palo had not led his troops in person against the attack of the banditti. Indeed, it was evident that he had been aroused from his peaceful slumbers at the beginning of the excitement; even now he had not removed his nightcap. He was not half so fierce-appearing in this headgear as he had been in his plumed hat.
But Tom Hotchkiss, cowering in a corner, seemed to think that the general was quite fierce enough.