The sound of many moving horses under her window called her thoughts.
The soldiers were setting out. Tomaso and a hundred of Mendoza's fighting peons were with them. Morando and O'Donnell rode together, in earnest conversation.
"The place to find the scamp is always where you would least likely think him to be," O'Donnell observed.
Yoscolo's trail was found at the Berryessa rancho, where he had been the morning of the previous day. The Indian had waited some time to obtain powder from a cache in the hills, then started across the valley, secure in the thought that Morando and his men were miles away in the mountains.
About the middle of the afternoon he was overtaken at La Cuesta de los Gatos, ten miles south of San José.
At sight of the pursuers Yoscolo intrenched himself in a rocky cañon, which, he believed, could not be approached by flank movements, while a successful frontal attack seemed impossible. Here he waited, intending to slip away at night.
O'Donnell, on the stallion, followed by Tomaso and his peons, scaled the rocky edge of a precipice, and suddenly appeared on a ledge thirty feet above the renegades.
"El Diablo! El Diablo!" they shouted.
A number of shots were fired at O'Donnell. He swung under the horse's body, and the shots went wild.
The stallion braced its feet and slid down the cliff followed by the others.