“We haven’t a chance, Henry,” she said. “They are too many. If you fight you will be killed. And then what will become of me? Better that you make your own escape, and bring help, leaving me to be retaken, than that you die and let me be retaken anyway.”
But he shook his head.
“We are not going to be taken, dearest sister. Put your trust in me and watch. Here they come now. You just watch.”
Variously mounted, on horses and pack mules—whichever had come handiest in their haste—Torres, the Jefe, and their men clattered into sight. Henry drew a sight, not on them, but on the point somewhat nearer where he had made his first plant of dynamite. When he pulled trigger, the intervening distance rose up in a cloud of smoke and earth dust that obscured them. As the cloud slowly dissipated, they could be seen, half of them, animals and men, overthrown, and all of them dazed and shocked by the explosion.
Henry seized Leoncia’s hand, jerked her to her feet, and ran on side by side with her. Conveniently beyond his second planting, he drew her down beside him to rest and catch breath.
“They won’t come on so fast this time,” he hissed exultantly. “And the longer they pursue us the slower they’ll come on.”
True to his forecast, when the pursuit appeared, it moved very cautiously and very slowly.
“They ought to be killed,” Henry said. “But they have no chance, and I haven’t the heart to do it. But I’ll surely shake them up some.”
Again he fired into his planted dynamite, and again, turning his back on the confusion, he fled to his third planting.
After he had fired off the third explosion, he raced Leoncia to his tethered horse, put her in the saddle, and ran on beside her, hanging on to her stirrup.