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CHAPTER XI.
A DROP IN THE DARK

"Hark!"

It was Jack who uttered the exclamation.

The shouts were growing louder. Evidently the Mexicans had kept a closer watch than he or Pete had imagined, and had quickly taken alarm at the prolonged absence of their companion.

The boy could hear them battering the oak door of the cell they had so recently occupied.

"Let 'em batter away," muttered Pete. "I shot the bolt on the inside."

To his amazement, Jack actually heard his companion chuckle. What could the cow-puncher be made of, steel or granite, or a combination of both!

And now Pete began to wriggle along the ledge, pressing with all his weight against the wall.

"Come on," he breathed to Jack, "throw all your weight inward and don't look up or down."

In mortal fear of finding his body hurtling backward into vacancy at any moment, the boy followed the intrepid cow-puncher along the narrow footpath. Perhaps it needed more pluck on his part to proceed along the insecure ledge in the pitchy blackness than it did on the part of the nervy cow-puncher. Who shall take the exact measure of courage?

At last they reached the angle of the tower, and Pete stood still. To proceed round the sharp angle, on no wider pathway than that which they trod, would be manifestly impossible. Yet go on they must. Suddenly Pete gave a cry of joy. Looking down into the darkness, he had seen, not more than ten feet beneath them, the sharp ridge of an addition to the old Mission church. If they could reach that he knew, from calculating the height of the tower, they would not be far from the ground.

Behind them the yells and shouts were growing louder.

To think, with Pete, was to act. With a muttered prayer, one of the few he had ever uttered in his rough life, the cow-puncher crouched as well as he could on the ledge. Putting over first one leg and then the other, he deliberately dropped downward, till his hands gripped the edge of the ledge on which a second before he had stood. His muscles cracked as the sudden strain came on them, but he held fast, and a second later let go. He landed to his intense joy, on a rough tiled roof, after an easy drop of not more than four feet.

"Come on," he breathed upward to Jack, who had watched the cow-puncher's daring act with horrified eyes.

"I – I can't," shivered the boy, who, plucky as he was, dreaded the idea of a drop into the dark. "You go on, Pete, and leave me."

"Not much I won't. You make that drop, or I'll give you the biggest hiding you ever had, Jack Merrill, when I get hold of you."

The cowboy had hit on just the words to bring Jack to the proper pitch to take the leap.

"You ain't scared, are you?" whispered up Pete, determined to brace the boy up in the way he knew would prove most effective.

Just as Pete had done a few moments previously, Jack, without a word, knelt for one awful second on the brink of space and then gingerly put over first one leg and then the other. Then followed the same terrible rush into blackness that Pete had experienced, and the same soul-sickening jolt and heart-leap as his fingers gripped, and he hung safe.

"Drop!" snapped Pete.

Jack's fingers obediently unclasped their desperate grip, and he shot downward to be caught in Pete's arms.

"Not so bad when you get used to it," whispered the cow-puncher. "Now then, slide down."

"Slide down – where?"

"This rope. While you were getting ready up there" – even in the dark Jack felt his cheeks flush – "while you were getting ready up there, I fastened that greaser's rope to this old water-spout. All you got to do is to slide down."

A second later Jack flashed down the side of the old church to the ground, where, almost as soon as he had landed, Coyote Pete joined him.

"What now?" asked Jack amazedly. He had never dreamed when they stood on that dizzy tower that in less than ten minutes they would be on firm ground. Nor did he forget how much of the so-far successful escape was due to Coyote Pete's skill and resourcefulness. But the hardest and most dangerous part was yet to come.

Already the whole of the old church was aglow with lights, flashing hither and thither, and outside, shout answered shout from a dozen points of the compass.

"We'll run in the direction where there is the least racket," wisely decided Pete.

"Crouch as low as you can, Jack," he ordered, as, doubled almost in half, he darted off into the darkness.

Imitating his guide as best he could, Jack followed, but as ill-luck would have it, their way led past an old well. In the pitch blackness the boy did not avoid what Pete seemed to have steered clear of by instinct. With a crash that woke the echoes, he blundered headlong into a big pile of tin buckets and pails which had been placed there that day. A bull running amuck in a tin shop could hardly have made more noise.

"My great aunt alkali, you've done it now!" growled Pete, as the terrific crash sounded close behind him.

"Oh, go on, Pete! Go on, and leave me," cried Jack miserably. "I'll only hamper you. Go on by yourself."

"I'll go with you or not at all," was Pete's firm rejoinder. "Come on, now, hurry. They're bound to have heard that, and they'll be 'round here like so many hornets in a minute."

Pete's prophecy proved correct. Hardly had the clanging, clashing echoes of the avalanche of dislodged tinware died out, before they heard Black Ramon's voice shouting:

"Over there! Over there by the well. Fire at them."

Jack did not know much Spanish, but he could comprehend this.

"Fire away," muttered Pete grimly, as they rapidly wormed their way along among the scrub. "You'll not do us any harm by shooting at the well, but you'll drill your rotten tinware full of holes."

But the Mexicans having now recovered from their first excitement, turned their thoughts to other ways of getting back the fugitives than by firing into the darkness after them. To the ears of Jack and Pete was soon borne the trample of horses, and the rattle of galloping hoofs, as Black Ramon's men spread out through the darkness looking for them.

"They're going to form a ring," he whispered, as they squirmed their way along; "that's what they're going to do. They know we are without horses or weapons, and that if they only make the ring large enough they're bound to get us."

On and on they crept, so close to the ground that the burning dust, which had a plentiful ad-mixture of alkali in it, filled their eyes and nose. Pete was more or less used to the stuff, having ridden sometimes for days at a time in it behind herds of cattle or horses, but to Jack the smarting sensation in mouth and nostrils was almost unbearable. The stuff fairly choked him.

Suddenly Pete's hand shot out and gripped Jack's arm with a viselike pressure. Jack interpreted the signal without a word.

"Stop!"

Down they both crouched in the alkali dust among the brush, hardly daring to breathe.

Long before Jack's ears had caught a sound, Pete's quick eye had detected something. He laid his ear to the ground.

"Too dry," he muttered, after holding it there an instant.

Then he drew from his pocket his knife and opened both blades. The larger he thrust into the earth and placed his ear against the smaller bit of steel.

"Just as I thought. Coming this way!" he muttered. "We'll have to lie low and trust to luck."

Presently the trampling that the cowboy's rough-and-ready telegraph had detected became distinctly audible, and against the star-spattered sky Jack saw two black figures on horseback slowly rise up from a hollow. They came into view as slowly as fairies rising to the stage from a trap-door in a theatre.

Neither Pete nor Jack dared to breathe, as the two figures appeared and paused as if undecided which way to go. Suddenly one of them began to speak.

"No sign of 'em in here, amigo. Say ombre, I tell you what – you ride off to the right, and I'll take the left trail. We've covered all the other ground, and that way we're bound to get 'em."

The Mexican grunted something and rode off in the direction the other had indicated.

"It's Jim Cummings, the dern skunk," whispered Coyote Pete to Jack, his indignation at the idea of being hunted by the renegade cowboy getting the better of his prudence.

For one terrible minute Jack thought they had been discovered. Jim Cummings, who had been riding off, stopped his pony abruptly and faced round in the saddle.

"Queer," he said to himself; "thought I heard something. Guess I'll take a look and see if the critters left any trail through hereabouts. I wouldn't trust myself alone with Coyote Pete, but I know he's got no shooting iron, and I reckon this will fetch down a dozen like him, or the kid with him."

He patted his revolver – a big forty-four – as he spoke, and dismounted. Throwing his pony's reins over his head, in plainsman's fashion, the renegade struck a match and bent down toward the ground. He was looking to see if Jack or Coyote Pete had passed that way.

What happened then came so quickly that afterward, when he tried to tell it, Jack never could get the successive incidents arranged clearly in his own mind. All that was audible was a frightened gasp from the renegade as the glare of a match fell on Coyote Pete's face. Wet with sweat, plastered with dust, and disfigured by righteous anger at the renegade, Pete's countenance was indeed one to inspire terror in the person suddenly lighting upon it.

Before the gasp had died out of Jim cummings' throat, and before he could utter the cry that somehow refused to come, Coyote Pete, with a spring like that of a maddened cougar, was on him, and bore him earthward with a mighty crash.

"Take that, you coward, you sneak, you traitor!" he snarled vindictively under his breath, as the unfortunate Jim Cummings struggled and his breath came in sharp wheezes. As he spoke, Coyote Pete, temporarily transformed by rage and scorn to a wild beast, savagely hammered Jim Cummings' head against the ground.

He was recalled to himself by Jack, who, after his first moment of startled surprise, realized that unless he interfered Cummings would in all likelihood be killed.

"Pete, Pete, are you mad?" he gasped, seizing the other's arm and staying it, as the furious cow-puncher was about to bring it crashing down into the renegade's face.

"Mad!" repeated Pete, looking up, "well, I guess so. But I'm glad you brought me to my senses, son. I'd hate to have the blood of such a varmint as this on my conscience."

He rose to his feet, still breathing heavily from his furious outburst.

"Phew! but that did me good," he said, rolling the unconscious Cummings over with a contemptuous foot. "I reckon this coyote won't go hunting his own people with a pack of yellow dogs for a long time to come."

Pete was right, it was many a day before Cummings got over his thrashing, but in the meantime the delay occasioned by Pete's outbreak came near to costing them dear.

A sudden trampling in the darkness behind them made them turn, and they saw dimly the figure of a horseman behind them. The starlight glinted on his rifle barrel as he aimed it at them and covered both the fugitives beyond hope of escape.

"Up your hands!"

The command came from the new arrival in broken, but none the less vigorous and unmistakable English.

CHAPTER XII.
A RIDE FOR THE HILLS

But instead of complying with the demand, Coyote Pete did a strange thing. He waved his hands above his head and rushed straight at the man with the rifle. As he had expected, the pony the Mexican bestrode was, like most western animals, only half broken. The sight of this sudden figure leaping toward it out of the brush caused it to wheel sharply with a snort of dismay.

So unexpected was the maneuver that the Mexican, no less than his horse, was taken by surprise. His rifle almost slipped from his fingers as he tried to seize the reins and control his pony. When once more he turned, it was to find himself looking into the business-like muzzle of Jim Cummings' pistol, which Pete had quickly jerked from the unconscious man's holster.

"Now, then, amigo," ordered Pete, "get off. Pronto!"

"But, hombre – " began the Mexican.

"Get off!"

Pete accompanied this command by baring his white teeth in such terrifying fashion that the other quickly dismounted.

"Give me his lariat," ordered Pete to Jack, but never for an instant taking his eyes off the Mexican.

Jack, glad of a chance to be of some use, sprang forward. In a trice he detached the Mexican's lariat from his saddle horn and waited Pete's next order.

"Tie him, and tie him good and tight," ordered the cow-puncher. "Don't mind hurting him. These greasers have got a hide as tough as Old Scratch himself."

It did not take Jack long to bind the follower of Black Ramon hand and foot, and then, with a sarcastic apology, Pete tore off a strip of his not overclean shirt, rolled it in a ball, and shoved it into the Mexican's mouth.

"There, he is hog-tied and silenced, with neatness and dispatch," he said. "Now for Cummings, and then we're off."

Cummings was still insensible, and the operation of tying him with his own rawhide, and forcing a gag into his mouth didn't take long.

"I hate to ride without a lariat," said Pete, "but it can't be helped. And anyhow, we've got two good cayuses by as big a stroke of luck as ever a cow-puncher had. You take that plug of the greaser's, Jack. I've got a fancy to this fellow of Cummings', here. And mind, if anybody says a word to us you let me do the talking."

Soon afterward, both, on a further suggestion of Pete's, wrapped in the bound men's serapes – or cloaks, – the two adventurers set forward toward the north.

"Now we're headed for God's country," grunted Pete, as he kept his eyes fixed on the north star, which is the plainsman's as well as the sailor's night guide.

"How can you locate it without a compass?" asked Jack, as Pete informed him how he had located their direction.

"By the outside stars of the Dipper, Jack," said Pete. "The good Lord put 'em there, I reckon, so as white men situated as you and I are should have no trouble in finding the way to his country. For, you mark my words, Jack, there ain't no God's country south of the border. It all belongs to the other fellow, and they're working for him in double shifts."

The ponies which they now bestrode were fine little animals – quick as cats on their feet and evidently hard as nails, for their coats were as dry to the touch as kindling wood, despite all the excitement they had undergone.

"Feels good to have a horse between your legs again," said Pete, still in a low, cautious voice, for they were by no means out of danger as yet.

"Yes," whispered Jack, "I've heard it said that a cow-puncher without his pony is only half a man."

"I guess maybe you're right," agreed Pete, urging forward his little animal by a dig in the sides.

"Say, Pete," whispered Jack suddenly, as they rode slowly forward under the star-sprinkled heavens, "I do wish we could go back and make a strike for the freedom of the others. It seems kind of mean for us to be safe and sound here, and leaving them back in the lion's mouth, so to speak."

"Don't worry about that, Jack. By getting over on to good Yankee soil we are doing more to help them than we could in any other way. If we turned back now we might spoil everything, and as to being safe and sound – Hark!"

Both reined in their ponies and listened intently. From far behind was borne to their ears the distant noise of shouts and cries. Standing on the elevation to which they had now attained, the sounds came through the clear night air with great distinctness.

"They're making a fine hullaballoo," commented Jack. "Do you think they've found Cummings and the other?"

"Don't know. Guess not, though. The sounds seem to be coming from more to the eastward than where we left them; but say, Jack, don't you hear anything else but hollering?"

"Why, yes, I do seem to hear a kind of queer sound; what is it?"

"The very worst sound we could get wind of, Jack – it's bloodhounds."

"Bloodhounds!" gasped Jack, who had read and heard much of the ferocity and tracking ability of the animals. "They will trace us down and tear us to pieces."

"Hum, you've bin readin' Uncle Tom's Cabin, I reckon," sniffed Pete. "No, they won't tear us to pieces, Jack, but what they will do is to round us up and then set up the almightiest yelling and screeching and baying you ever heard. They'll bring the whole hornet's nest down around our ears."

"What are we to do, Pete?" breathed Jack, completely at a loss in the face of this new peril, which seemed doubly hard to bear, coming as it did when escape had seemed certain.

"Dunno. Just ride ahead, I reckon, that's all we can do, and thank our lucky stars it ain't daylight. If only we was a spell farther into the hills, we might strike water, and that would throw them off."

"How would that confuse them?"

"Well, hounds can't track through water. It kills the scent. I'd give several head of beef critters for a sight of a creek right now."

All this time they had been riding ahead, and although it was pitchy dark they could tell that they were rising. Whether they were on a trail or not, they had no means of knowing. That the ground was rough and stony, though, they knew, for the ponies, sure-footed as they were, stumbled incessantly.

"Good thing none of Ramon's men reached out as far as this, or we'd sure be giving ourselves away every time one of these cayuses shakes a foot," grunted Pete.

"I wish it wasn't so black," whispered Jack, who was riding a little in advance. "I can't see a thing ahead. I wonder if – Oh!"

His pony had suddenly given a wild leap backward, missed its footing, and slid down some sort of a steep bank.

"Jumping gee whilkers, what in blazes!" began Pete, when in just the same way he went sliding forward into space.

Both ponies fetched up, after stumbling several feet down a steep declivity, and the sound that their hoofs made as they did so was one of the most welcome that the fugitives could have heard.

Splash! splash!

"Water!" exclaimed Pete. "Our blind luck is just naturally holding out."

"Is it a watercourse?" inquired Jack, "or just a hole."

Pete leaned over, holding on by crooking his left foot against the cantle of his saddle.

"It's a creek, and flowing lively, too," he announced, as he held his hand in the water, "and incidentally, as the newspaper fellers say, I'm thirsty."

"So am I," agreed Jack. "Let's have a drink. Besides, we don't know how long it may be before we get another."

"You've the makings of a cow-puncher in you," approved Pete, slipping from his saddle. Side by side the two lay on the brink of the stream and drank till they could drink no more. The water was cool, though tainted with a slightly alkaline taste common to most mountain creeks in that region. Refreshed, they stood up once more and listened. The baying still came incessantly, accompanied by shouts of encouragement from the riders behind the dogs. It was getting unpleasantly near, also.

"Time for us to cut stick," grunted Pete, swinging himself into his saddle once more. Jack did the same.

"Now to fool 'em," chuckled the cow-puncher.

The ponies' noses were turned up stream, and the sure-footed little animals rapidly traversed the slippery rocks and holes of the creek bed.

"These are great little broncs," said Jack with a sigh, "but don't I wish I had Firewater. I wonder if I'll ever see him again?"

"Sure you will, boy," comforted Pete, although in his own heart he had serious doubts of it. Pete knew that a Mexican loves a good pony above all things, and that once having possession of Firewater, Ramon would let him pass out of his hands willingly, seemed unlikely.

Every now and then, as they stumbled forward in the darkness, they paused and listened. The baying had suddenly stopped, and then broke out afresh with renewed vigor. It had a puzzled note in it, too.

"They're stuck for a time," grunted Pete, "but we haven't shaken them off yet. Yip-ee! hear them dogs holler! They've found the place where we entered the water."

"Then we are out of danger?"

"Not yet, boy. We'll not be out of danger till we're over the border and among our own folks. These greasers are no fools, and in a few minutes they'll realize that we've taken to the water, and be along the bank after us."

"But if we turn out here they won't know in which direction we've gone," argued Jack. "Let's leave the creek here and turn north again."

They had been traveling due east through the night, and he waved his hand as he spoke, toward the left bank of the stream.

"Kiddie, you've got horse sense, all right," approved Pete. "I guess that's the best thing for us to do. Anyhow, we've gone as far as we want to in this direction, and it's time to head for home again."

Home – never had the word held so sweet a sound for either of the two imperiled fugitives.