When all was in readiness Quelele led the way up the tortuous watercourse and through the mighty gates of porphyry nearly blocking the farther reaches. They were forced to lead the animals, whose sure-footedness was put to the test every yard of the advance. Beyond the great pillars the gorge opened to a rough amphitheatre with less steeply sloping sides. A narrow upward-springing ledge of rock led away from the dry watercourse to a rock pulpit some seventy-five or a hundred feet above. This they followed, to discover there was space for their horses to stand behind the horn of malapais and still be screened from observation from below. Quelele made some mysterious passes with a tether rope which yoked all the animals to a single line that was anchored at both ends.
“Look,” Benicia cried as Bim was taking the carbines from the saddle scabbards. They followed her pointing hand and saw a dark spot against the opposite wall of the gorge and higher than their level. A midget figure was outlined against the opening of a cave. It was El Doctor at his business of propitiating Elder Brother—El Doctor, much needed behind the stock of a carbine. The men hallooed to him but he did not turn.
“Go over and get that crazy fool,” Bim commanded Quelele. But the big Indian, instead of obeying immediately, turned up the ledge and made for a high point on the shoulder of the rock bastion constituting one of the portals of the upper gorge. They watched him as he scaled the almost perpendicular face of black lava. From the top Quelele had a view of the cañon’s far-away exit onto the desert floor several miles from the niche where the treasure seekers had refuge. The watchers saw him lift himself cautiously over the top of his lookout and peer to westward. Then he came scrambling and sliding down.
“They come into the valley,” the Papago reported. “Too late to get El Doctor.”
It was Bim with his desert craft who made disposition of the little force of defence. Quelele he sent back to the aerie with orders not to shoot until he heard shots from the whites; the Indian’s fire from the rear, once Urgo and his men had passed the rocky portals, would throw the rurales into confusion. Grant and Benicia he disposed behind an outcrop of porphyry a little behind and above the protected animals.
“Pick ’em off as they come through the Gate,” he suggested. “An’ don’t try any fancy shooting; we haven’t got any too many cartridges.”
“But you—?” Benicia began. The Arizonan grinned broadly.
“Me, I always fancy a little solo game in this sort of rukus. I’m going on t’other side of the gulch. Cross-fire, you sabe?” He left them with a smile on his lips, and they watched him jumping lightly down from rock to rock. Almost before he had begun to clamber up the opposite wall he was lost to view amid the maze of fissure and castellated boulder. Grant and the girl were stretched out behind their primitive breastwork alone in this unfinished world of fire. They could see neither Quelele nor Bagley. Came to their ears the faint drone of barbaric song: El Doctor Coyote Belly at his traitorous devotions.
The whole gorge was filled with a saffron glare like the reflection from oil fires under a boiler, unworldly, portentous.
They waited, these two, in the immensity of earth’s disgorged bowels. Side by side, elbows touching, they counted the slow drag of minutes as naught in the balance against the deep joy of love militant.