e a
running fight for it, but I'll take the odds."

"Come then. You're a brave man, Mr. Thode!" Gentleman Geoff led the
way swiftly across the patio to a little door half hidden in the
creeping vines. But even as he laid his hand upon the rusty bolts,
there was a storm of feet in the alley and a rain of shot pattered
against the outer wall.

Gentleman Geoff stepped back with a gesture of defeat, but Thode cried
desperately:

"I can cut my way through them. I must, Man! Open the door!"

Instead, his companion shot the hasp of a small oblong look-out on a
level with their eyes, and Thode beheld the alley choked with figures,
their carbines bristling and maniacal, distorted faces pressed close.

"No use." Gentleman Geoff snapped the slide in place as a stray bullet
whistled past their ears. "It's too late. Even had you gone when Sam
first came, they would have cut you down in the plaza. You can only
lend a hand here."

Wordlessly, Thode stumbled back beside him to the gambling-room. That
which but a moment before had seemed like a wild, purposeless stampede
had resolved itself into an unorganized but determined defensive. Few
of the men had departed, those few who had ridden in from nearby
haciendas where unwarned families waited in ignorance of the menace
sweeping down upon them from the hills.

Thode worked with heaving chest and straining muscles, but his brain
was singularly clear and his observation acute. Gentleman Geoff seemed
to be everywhere at once, urging, exhorting, commanding. The mozos,
their yellow faces gray, were huddled in a corner, clucking like
dismayed fowl at the approach of a storm, but a word from Billie sent
them scurrying for the store of guns and ammunition.

She, too, it was who opened the door of an inner room where a group of
disheveled women, their faces ghastly beneath the cheap paint, cowered
about a roulette-table, and ranged them behind the shelter of the stout
mahogany bar, seeing to it that each was armed.

Her calm face in the tumult and smoke and dust seemed etherialized,
glorified to the wondering eyes of the young engineer; the marvel of
her strength and courage shone forth like a radiance, imbuing even the
panic-stricken Celestials with a spirit of defense.

Thode's eyes were smarting, his veins on fire and in his nostrils the
reek of powder mingled with a strange, new, sweetish odor. The
table-top on which he stood was slippery where Rufe Terwilliger had