he channel to
the west of the island; Manuel and Tomas to the east of it quite out of
our sight; Thornton and Crawford ten paces north, in sight of both
ourselves and the Mexicans. A little moonlight filtered down through
the trees, but not enough to enable us to see any distance.

Scarcely were we asleep, it seemed to me, before Curly awakened Cress
and myself, growling immediately at our heads. Rising in our blankets,
guns in hand, and listening intently, we could hear on the hillside
above us what sounded like the movements of a bear. Whatever it might
be, it was approaching. Not a word had been spoken, and Curly's growls
were so low we had no idea any of the others had been roused. So we
sat on the alert for perhaps fifteen minutes, when the sounds above us
began receding, and we lay down again. But just as we were passing
back into dreamland, Curly again startled us with a sharper, fiercer
note that meant trouble at hand.

As we rose to a sitting posture, in the dim moonlight we could plainly
see a dark crouching figure twenty yards below, which advanced a step
or two, stopped as if to listen, and again advanced and stopped. What
it was we could not make out. At first I thought it must be a bear,
but presently I felt sure I caught the glimmer of a gun barrel, and
nudged Cress with my elbow. We were in the act of raising our rifles
to down it, whatever it might be, when Thornton sang out, "Hold on,
boys; that's old Tomas!" And, indeed, so it proved. All had been
awakened at the first alarm, and Thornton had seen Tomas roll from his
blankets into the bottom of the east channel, and crawl away on the
scout for the cause of Curly's uneasiness that so nearly had cost him
his life. He had been so intent for movement on the hillsides he had
not noticed us watching him.

The next morning we were moving by dawn, Tomas, Cress, and myself in
the lead, the others trailing along one hundred or two hundred yards
behind us. For half a mile the gorge widened, as most mountain gorges
do near their heads, into beautiful grassy slopes rising steeply before
us, thickly timbered with post oak. Then, issuing from the timber, we
saw it was a blind canon we were in, a _cul de sac_, with no pass
through the crest of the range.

Before us rose a very nearly perpendicular wall for probably six
hundred feet, up which the old trail zigzagged, climbing from ledge to
ledge, so steep that when, later, we were fetching our horses