At the same moment the duenna started to her feet. A wonderful and terrible transition came over her usually placid countenance. Her eyes fairly blazed with mingled fury and hatred. Her fists were clenched by her side. Her whole frame trembled. “Murdered by Ben Thurston!” she added, the words hissing like hot lava from her lips. “Murdered?” cried Merle, incredulously. She too, had risen. “Yes, pushed over the cliff by his coward hands. His torn coat, one of the buttons between her dead fingers, proclaimed his guilt before God and man. But there was no justice in the land in those days—the days when the gringos broke up our Spanish homes. Now you know everything—that was the real reason of the Vendetta of the Hills.” Tia Teresa was calm again—it was Merle who was deeply agitated, too deeply agitated for a moment to speak. The duenna went on triumphantly. “But the vendetta once sworn will always be fulfilled. Tonight at Comanche Point—” Then she stopped short, as she saw the look of terror and horror on Merle’s pale face. “Tonight?” queried the young girl tremulously. “They meet tonight? Then that is where Mr. Robles is going—that is why he bade us all that sad good-bye? My father, oh, my dear father!” And dropping down again on the sofa, she burst into a passion of weeping. Tia Teresa sought to soothe her. But Merle was not to be comforted. Yet while she sobbed she was thinking, for suddenly she rose again and dashed away her tears. “At what hour tonight?” she asked. “I do not know,” answered the duenna. “Then he is in danger—perhaps at this very moment he is in danger. Don Manuel’s life—my father’s life is worth a hundred lives of such a man as Ben Thurston. Quick, quick, Teresa. Get your mantilla and cloak. My runabout is in readiness. There, let me help you.” Merle was speaking with swift insistence. “Where are you going?” whispered Tia Teresa, as the girl’s fingers were buttoning her cloak. “To Comanche Point. We may not be too late to save him.” A minute later the two women had stolen down the narrow stairway of the tower and were speeding through the gathering darkness of the night. CHAPTER XLI—Beneath the Precipice WILLOUGHBY had found his friends Munson and Jack Rover at Buck Ashley’s old store, eagerly awaiting his coming, with a fine supper sizzling on the cook stove, prepared in Jack’s finest professional cowboy style. “We’ve got to feed you up a bit, I reckon,” grinned Jack, as he slipped the Gargantuan slab of beef-steak from the griller on to the big hot dish waiting for its reception. “And some potatoes, too,” he went on, “not forgetting the fried onions that beat all your newfangled sauces to a frazzle.”