Almost as one the rifles of Grant and Benicia jetted lead. Two more shots from the dry wash. The giant figure of Bagley with Stooder limp over one shoulder never faltered in its leaping and scrambling up the declivity to the shelter he had quitted. The two who had been following his flight with stilled hearts saw him disappear behind a great rock; an instant and a jet of fire lanced down thence at the attackers by the Gate. A blob of rain large as a Mexican dollar smacked on Benicia’s hand as she pumped the ejector--another and a third. Then the gorge was blasted by a thunder shock amid the peaks, and a stab of lightning painted the whole pit sulphurous blue. By its flash the defenders saw scurrying figures leaping from rock to rock in the stream bed. Quelele, the quick of eye, fired his first shot by the light of storm fire; one of the rurales went down like a wet sack. A second stunning burst of thunder which knocked out the underpinning of the sky. Then deluge. It was not rain that fell; it was solid water in sheets and cones which hissed with the speed of its descent. Water so compacted that it was like a river on edge, engulfing. With it the almost continuous quiver and jerk of electrical flame. The gorge was become a watery hell. More than that, for Urgo and his men in the wash it threatened momentarily to be their tomb. Already a white streak of foam in the lightning flashes marked where the once bone-dry watercourse was changing character. The rurales and their leader found the odds all of a sudden snatched from their hands by this frenzied ally of the hunted girl and her supporters. They had come eleven against five, with their quarry caught in a hole in the Pinacate sierra; before the cloudburst had endured three minutes Urgo realized he had let himself and his men into a fatal trap. Their horses, confidently left behind them in the lower reaches of the gorge, must already have stampeded under the lash of the storm. Spiteful rifle flashes from both sides came with each baleful flicker of fire from the sky to deny escape from the rising waters up either wall of the chasm. Now a dull roaring above the waterfall of the rain began to fill the gash in the sierra. Away back at the head of the gorge and where the slope from the twin volcano peaks shed water as from steep roofs into this common trough, a solid wall, capped dull white, came with the speed of a meteor down and down through the channel in the living rock. It rolled boulders the size of box-cars in its flood; a chevaux-de-frise of barbed cactus and scrub trees tumbled at its crest.