Quelele also saw several specks dropping earthward from the clear blue; specks which rapidly grew from the size of gnats to the spread of small aeroplanes. King condors they, who had smelled a feast from afar--loathsome birds with a wing spread covering the span of thirteen feet. The coming of one of these foul creatures to his particular banquet even the sharp eye of a Papago watcher could not discern, for the scene was hidden from him by a shoulder of the cañon wall. A stunted _palo verde_ tree nearly stripped of its verdure by the whips of the rain hung half-uprooted over the rapidly diminishing stream in the wash. One branch had caught and held some flotsam from the high flood, now clear of the water. Just a shapeless bundle of clothes, lolling head, arms askew where broken bones had let inert flesh sag to the current. Just a grim caricature of something which so recently had walked in the pride of his imaginings. The condor flopped clumsily to a branch stub six feet distant from the bundle of clothes, folded his great wings with a dry rustling of feathers, blinked the red lids of his eyes to focus his vision for expert inspection and studied the hank of cloth and flesh suspended in the tree crotch. The thing which flood waters had brought stirred slightly; eyes opened with a flutter. They met the critical gaze of the feathered pariah on the stub. The condor acknowledged this unexpected show of life on his banquet table by disturbed bobbings of the naked yellow head--the skin on his poll was wrinkled as an old man’s--and a bringing of his off eye to bear around his sabre beak with the skew-like movement of a hen sighting a worm. The wreck in the bundle of clothes opened his lips to scream but the ghost of a groan came instead. It tried to lift a fending arm against the abomination so near; the muscles tugged at broken bones. The condor appraised these manifestations of life carefully, weighed them by contrast with his experiences with crippled sheep and helpless calves. His talons stirred restlessly on the branch. First one, then the other lifted from the bark, stretched and flexed. The king of the higher airs was impatient. He spread his wings to balance him and clumsily hopped a few feet nearer, craning his wattled neck anxiously. A shadow passed swiftly over the _palo verde_ tree. A quick upward twist of the head gave the condor view of a putative and too-anxious fellow guest at the bounty spread there. Greediness pushed him. He spread his wings and hopped again-- Then the desert exacted with cruelty recompense for the cruelties of Colonel Hamilcar Urgo. Abomination of his passing was meted him according to the abominations of his own devising. An hour after the last rain drop the flood waters in the gorge had dropped to permit of reunion between the erstwhile defenders of the pass. Grant waded waist deep with Benicia in his arms; Bim, all smiles, was stretching out a hand from the off-side rocks.