"This last rush was the nearest. I had started to say that though the heat-shimmer was bad, either Estorijo or myself wounded one of their ponies. We saw him stumble. "Another rush---- "Our ammunition "Only a few cartridges left. "The Red One like a whirlwind only fifty yards away. "We fire separately now as they sneak up under cover of our smoke. "We put the fire out. Estorijo--" [_It is possible that Karslake had begun here to chronicle the death of the Mexican_.] "I have killed the Spotted One. Just as he wheeled his horse I saw him in a line with the rifle-sights and let him have it squarely. It took him straight in the breast. I could _feel_ that shot strike. He went down like a sack of lead weights. By God, it was superb! "Later.--They have drawn off out of range again, and we are allowed a breathing-spell. Our ponies are either dead or dying, and we have dragged them around us to form a barricade. We lie on the ground behind the bodies and fire over them. There are twenty-seven cartridges left. "It is now mid-afternoon. Our plan is to stand them off if we can till night and then to try an escape between them. But to what purpose? They would trail us so soon as it was light. [Illustration: CAUGHT IN THE CIRCLE. The last stand of three troopers and a scout overtaken by a band of hostile Indians _Drawn by Frederic Remington. Courtesy of Collier's Weekly._] "We think now that they followed us without attacking for so long because they were waiting till the lay of the land suited them. They wanted--no doubt--an absolutely flat piece of country, with no depressions, no hills or stream-beds in which we could hide, but which should be high upon the edges, like an amphitheatre. They would get us in the centre and occupy the rim themselves. Roughly, this is the bit of desert which witnesses our 'last stand.' On three sides the ground swells a very little--the rise is not four feet. On the third side it is open, and so flat that even lying on the ground as we do we can see (leagues away) the San Jacinto hills--'from whence cometh no help.' It is all sand and sage, forever and forever. Even the sage is sparse--a bad place even for a coyote. The whole is flagellated with an intolerable heat and--now that the shooting is relaxed--oppressed with a benumbing, sodden silence--the silence of a primordial world. Such a silence as must have brooded over the Face of the Waters on the Eve of Creation--desolate, desolate, as though a colossal, invisible pillar--a pillar of the Infinitely Still, the pillar of Nirvana--rose forever into the empty blue, human life an atom of microscopic dust crushed under its basis, and at the summit God Himself. And I find time to ask myself why, at this of all moments of my tiny life-span, I am able to write as I do, registering impressions, keeping a finger upon the pulse of the spirit. But oh! if I had time now--time to write down the great thoughts that do throng the brain.