This offered just the opportunity don Carlos had been waiting for. Jumping into the saddle, he galloped off without paying the slightest attention to the shouts sent after him.
The rescuing party was hastily organized. It consisted of a dozen horsemen, all of them carrying rifles, and under the leadership of Robledo and don Roque they speedily galloped off.
The news meanwhile had spread through the town and a group of women and children gathered to speed the troup of horsemen with shrill shouts. As they passed the house of the unfortunate Pirovani, Robledo could not restrain his uneasy impulse to glance up at the windows.
“This woman has perhaps prepared another tragedy for us,” he thought....
At that instant Watson was dismounting, and with Cachafaz at his heels, was crawling through the tough matorrales. The little half-breed had directed him to a sand hill on the edge of the plateau; and from this elevation he and his small guide could look down almost perpendicularly on the ruins of Dead Squaw ranch.
Watson knew the place by name. Twenty years earlier it had been inhabited by ranchers who sent their cattle out to pasture in the lands adjoining. But the capricious hurricanes of the desert had suddenly spread a thick mantel of sand over these pasture lands; then the waters of the well, which up till then had been relatively fresh, turned brackish, and finally became liquid salt. All the human inhabitants had fled and the adobe buildings soon fell into ruins. Only vagabonds now sought the shelter of the crumbling roof of the abandoned ranch.
As Watson advanced, cat-like, through the thick tough shrub-growths of the sand hill he felt an eerie fear at the stillness of the ranch below. Not a dog barked ... surely Cachafaz must have made a mistake in his deductions, surely that silent ranch was as deserted now as it had ever been! But the little half-breed wriggling ahead of him, stopped between two mattoral trunks and made a sign to Watson that he was to come nearer.
Thrusting his head between the branches Richard made out a sandy elevation twenty yards below in the centre of which was the ranch house. Two horses were nosing along together, nibbling at the sparse grass; and a man with a rifle laid across his knees sat on the ground keeping watch.
Cachafaz murmured into his ear,
“That’s one of the men who carried away the patroncita.”