l galloped even faster than before, and Kirby took hope. Then
more bullets and more yelps made him think that his advantage might
prove only temporary. Nevertheless, he laughed again, and as he became
accustomed to the feel of a stallion under him, he even essayed a few
pistol shots back at the pack of frantic, swarthy devils he had fooled.

[Illustration: _His head wavered back and forth and his hiss filled the
night._]

Three hours ago he had been eating a peaceful breakfast with his friend
and commandant, Colonel Miguel de Castanar, in the sunlit patio of the
commandant's hacienda. Castanar, chief of the air patrol for the
district, had waxed enthusiastic over the suppression of last spring's
revolutionists and the cowed state of up-country bandits. Captain
Freddie Kirby, American instructor of flying to Mexican pilots in the
making, had agreed with him and asked for one of the Wasps and three
days' leave with which to go visiting in Laredo. The simple matter of a
broken fuel line, a forced landing two hundred kilometres from nowhere,
and the unlucky proximity of the not-so-cowed horsemen, were the things
which had changed the day from what it had been to what it was.

The one piece of good fortune which had befallen him since the bandits
had surrounded the wrecked Wasp, looted it, and taken its lone pilot
prisoner, was the break he was getting now. During the squadron's first
halt to feed, he had knocked down his guards and made a bolt for the
grazing stallion. So far, the attempt was proving worth while.

* * * * *

On and on the stallion lunged toward the white mountains. Kirby's eyes
became red rimmed now from fatigue and the glare of the sun and the dust
of the pitilessly bare plateau. A negligible scalp wound under his mop
of straw-colored hair, slight as it was, did not add to his comfort. But
still he would not give up, for the horse, as if it sensed what its
rider needed most, was making directly for a narrow ravine which
debouched on the plateau from the nearest mountain flank.

It was the promise of cover afforded by the jagged rocks and jungle
growth of that ravine which kept hope alive in Kirby's throbbing brain.

The stallion was blown and staggering. Foam from the heavily bitted
mouth flashed back in great yellow flakes against Kirby's dust-caked
aviator's tunic. But just the same, the five mile gallop had carried
both horse and rider beyond range of any but the mos