The face of the young Apache became impassive. He turned about and spoke softly to Slade. The trader, half dead from his wounds, raised his big head to mumble a denial. At a word from Cochise, one of his men ran to fetch Elsie's brazier from the living room. In the bottom of the brazier was still a bed of glowing coals. The Apaches cut free one of Slade's feet and started to thrust it in upon the fire. Carmena flung up her hands before her eyes. "No!--no, Cochise!" she cried. "Kill him--he deserves to be killed! But not the torture--I can't bear it! I'll try to find Elsie for you. I think I know where she's hidden." Lennon stared, more than ever filled with horror of her treachery. "You--you!" he grasped. "That child--give her, to save that scoundrel?" "And ourselves," added Carmena, her lips curved in a cajoling smile at Cochise. "When I've found her--and the tizwin--we'll be friends. Won't we, Cochise?" "Sure. Dam' good friends," smoothly agreed the Apache. "You find my woman quick, I let you go. Sabe?" "_And_ the tizwin--the barrels of tizwin," added Carmena. "Come on, all of us together---- You, too, Jack." She signed to the Apaches and called out a few words in their own thick guttural tongue. Lennon did not hang back. Great as was his abhorrence of the girl, he started forward beside her. Probably owing to his ready advance, he was not again bound, though Cochise ordered a pair of his followers to guard the white man. The other Apaches pressed close after the leaders, drawn by their fierce craving for tizwin. Regardless of Lennon's look of loathing, Carmena lighted a candle and led the way direct to the mummy room. From a ceiling beam of the room had been hung a crudely stuffed horned owl with wide-spread wings. At sight of the big gray-white bird and of the mummies even Cochise advanced less than a step inside the entrance. Carmena went in with the candle and methodically peered among and behind all the heaps of rubbish. When she came back to the entrance her dark brows were drawn together in a frown, as if she were puzzled and trying to think of another hiding place. She looked at Lennon with a level glance. "Hereafter you will recall that the quick and the dead are associated," she murmured. She faced about to the superstitious Apaches. "You see, Cochise. Your woman doesn't like these old dried spirits any more than you do. Come on." Cochise and his men drew back before her advancing candle. They had no fancy to be left in the darkness with the bird of night and the "dried spirits" of the ancient cliff dwellers. They were not so backward, however, in the other inner rooms to which Carmena led them. Where there was a ceiling hole, one or more readily mounted with the candle to search the space above.