and Ethel was
pulling up the flag.

'Be jabers! and the Indians have come at last!' Terence exclaimed, and
they all three started at a run.

Maud turned round and waved her hand to them, and then she and Ethel
continued looking over the plain. At this moment they were joined on the
tower by Mrs. Hardy and Sarah.

'It is all right,' Charley, who was of an unexcitable temperament, said.
'The Indians must be a long way off, or the girls would be waving to us
to make haste. Take it easy; we shall want to keep our hands steady.'

So they broke from the headlong speed at which they had started, into a
steady trot, which in five minutes brought them up to the house.

'What is it?' they exclaimed as they gained the top of the tower.

'Oh dear, oh dear!' Ethel said. 'They have got all the animals.'

'And I fear they have killed Gomez and Pedro,' Mrs. Hardy added.

It was too evidently true. At a distance of six miles the boys could see
a dark mass rapidly retreating, and numerous single specks could be seen
hovering round them. Two miles from the house a single horseman was
galloping wildly. The girls had already made him out to be Lopez.

The boys and Terence stood speechless with dismay. The Irishman was the
first to find his tongue.

'Och, the thundering villains!' he exclaimed; 'the hathen thieves! And
to think that not one of us was there to give them a bating.'

'What will papa say?' Hubert ejaculated.

Charley said nothing, but looked frowningly, with tightly closed lips,
after the distant mass, while his hands closed upon his carbine. 'How
was it, Maud?' he asked at length.

'I was down-stairs,' Maud said, 'when Ethel, who had just gone up,
called down, "Come up, Maud, quickly; I think that something's the
matter." I ran up the steps, and I saw our animals a long way off,
nearly four miles, and I saw a black mass of something going along fast
towards them from the left. They were rather nearer to us than the
cattle were, and were in one of the slopes of the ground, so that they
would not have been seen by any one with the cattle; then, as they got
quite near the animals, I saw a sudden stir. The beasts began to gallop
away, and three black specks--who, I suppose, were the men--separated
themselves from them and went off sideways. One seemed to get a start of
the other two. These were cut off by the black mass, and I did not see
anything more of them. Lopez got away; and though some of the others
rode after