"The cañon's mouth is the mouth of hell," some one found courage to say.
"It is the gate of deliverance for the girls those renegades have stolen. Back to the pass, hombres! Back to the pass! and fight till the death!" She waved her rifle over her head. "Back to the pass, hombres, and make rescue!"
She turned her horse toward the cañon. "Follow me!"
She went forward. The men obeyed. From a walk, they urged their horses into a gallop, then into topmost speed. The dispirited rabble became a fighting battalion.
Stanislaus, in curiosity to see what had become of the column so rashly attacking him, had moved back into the wake of the retreating peons.
The hoof-thunder of horses tempestuously advancing caused him to throw his force into a hollow square, fearing that some body of capable soldiery, having tracked him, was about to make a charge on him.
For the third time within half an hour the chief's senses were held in wonder. The approaching troop was the same which a few minutes before had ignominiously fled before him. Rapidly they deployed, under Carmelita's orders, the line thus formed making the men a more difficult target, as the girl had learned in watching her father train fighting peons.
"Present rifles! Aim! Fire!" the señorita called in a single breath.
The cañon shook under the deafening detonation that resulted. Boulders, loosened by the concussion, rolled down the sides of the defile. A thousand echoes reiterated the vengeance of the valley peons.
Stanislaus's Indians, massed together, withered under the tremendous fusillade. Only those in front could use their weapons to advantage, the riflemen on sides and rear of the square being in danger of hitting their fellows, if they attempted to shoot low enough to strike among their enemy.