as he was, it was very likely that he
was wholly out of view of the band.

At last Weir moved his cylinders forward towards this edge. Afterwards
he straightened up and standing hands on hips, smoking his cigar, the
tiny crimson glow of which rose and fell, he watched the party nearing
the foot of the white gleaming wall, fifty feet below him.

For Janet the sight was too much. His indifference to risk froze her;
he appeared to be courting death; and she strove to open her lips to
send down to him an imploring cry to draw back, but succeeded in
uttering only a tremulous wail.

"They'll shoot him," Mary was saying, "oh, they'll kill him!"

A surge of terror swept Janet. Next thing she knew she was out of the
car and running down the hillside among the stones and the stalks of
sagebrush, frantic to reach him, to pull him out of view of the men
beneath. Only a single one of them had to cast a glance upward and to
raise his gun and fire, then he would die. He should not die! She
should fling herself as a protection before him rather than that he
should be slain!

On a sudden a hand reached up from a rock and seized her arm, stopping
her with a jerk. Then she was roughly pulled down beside it. The man
was Madden, the sheriff.

"What in hell are you doing?" he demanded harshly. "Have you gone
crazy?"

His grip was not relinquished.

"But see him! Aren't you men going to help him? Are you going to let
him be killed?"

Madden forced her to her knees, so that she was sheltered by the
outcrop of stone.

"Any man who can smoke a cigar like that at such a time as this knows
just what he's doing," was the answer. "Keep quiet and watch."

"Oh, I don't want to see," she said. But she continued to look with
fascinated eyes at the lone, calm figure on the dam.

Presently Madden pushed his gun forward over the rock.

"They've caught sight of him," he stated.

CHAPTER XXVI

THE THUNDERBOLT

The greater part of the number of bandits had stopped in a group a few
yards from the base of the white dam core, though a few stragglers
were some way behind. Among these Steele Weir made out the figure of
one whom he recognized as a white man; he whom the guard from the
spring had mentioned as directing the company; and when at a number of
exclamations from Mexicans who perceived the engineer the man lifted
his face, Weir saw he was Burkhardt.

No more than this was needed to show whose the hand behind this
treacherous