“Pick ’em off as they come through the Gate,” he suggested. “An’ don’t try any fancy shooting; we haven’t got any too many cartridges.” “But you--?” Benicia began. The Arizonan grinned broadly. “Me, I always fancy a little solo game in this sort of rukus. I’m going on t’other side of the gulch. Cross-fire, you sabe?” He left them with a smile on his lips, and they watched him jumping lightly down from rock to rock. Almost before he had begun to clamber up the opposite wall he was lost to view amid the maze of fissure and castellated boulder. Grant and the girl were stretched out behind their primitive breastwork alone in this unfinished world of fire. They could see neither Quelele nor Bagley. Came to their ears the faint drone of barbaric song: El Doctor Coyote Belly at his traitorous devotions. The whole gorge was filled with a saffron glare like the reflection from oil fires under a boiler, unworldly, portentous. They waited, these two, in the immensity of earth’s disgorged bowels. Side by side, elbows touching, they counted the slow drag of minutes as naught in the balance against the deep joy of love militant. A stir in the bed of the dry wash below them. Up went their carbines with cheeks laid against wood and eyes sighting along the lances of light. Again the stir down there. A gaunt figure rose from hand and knees to its feet, stood swaying for an instant, then pitched forward against the support of a slab of rock. A very leprechaun of the rocks was it: ribs creasing burned skin about the naked torso; whity-grey hair streaming down to mingle with a beard; bare arms like a spider’s legs and all cracked by the sun. The husk of Doc Stooder, plaything of the desert god, was come here, following the still living spark of instinct prompting a water search in a canyon. Come, too, to the secret hiding place of the treasure whose glitter had so mercilessly befooled him. Grant, stupefied by the apparition of death and failing in any recognition of the skeleton thing as the bibulous doctor of Arizora, suspected a trick of Urgo. Again he laid his eye along his rifle sight, vigilant for what might ensue. The creature spread-eagled against the rock slowly pushed itself upright with its hands; its shaggy head turned wearily as thirsting eyes scanned the dry chasm. Then a shout from across the gorge. Bagley had leaped from his hiding place and was rushing precariously down to succour the ghost. Just as he reached Stooder and had thrown an arm about him to heave his wasted form onto a shoulder the crack of a rifle shivered the gorge’s silence. Rock dust spurted within a foot of the rescuer. The sun went out that second--instantly, like a powerful incandescent switched off. A yellow penumbra tinged the darkness.