Light now was nearly gone from the western sky and the guards were riding farther away from the trudging line, deliberately inviting some one to offer himself for fair target practice while gunsights still could be seen. Grant faced the hazard squarely. Certain he was that none of the eight would see another sunrise, that butcher’s work would commence the minute sporting chances were definitively ignored by the victims. He was of no mind to be the passive party to a hog killing. Better a quick dash--a bullet from behind-- The line of men had just emerged from an arroyo with almost perpendicular sides; the bed of the dry stream was thick with shadow. Grant leaped from line and ran straight for the guard who rode between himself and the course of the stream. Almost at his stirrup he swerved and cut under the horse’s rump. Shouts. A shot gone wild. Grant, zigzagging, was at the brink of the arroyo. Two shots almost as one. A lance of fire through his shoulder. Up went his arms and he plunged headlong into the gulf of blackness. CHAPTER VIII THE HEART OF BENICIA The Desert of Altar is transcendence of silence. From the savage Growler range in Arizona south to the obsidian bastions of Pinacate, by the dead Gulf, is space to crowd five million people with their tumult of cities, their crash of machines, hoot of locomotives and shriek of steel under stress. Yet in all this blank waste not a sound. The chirp of the wren from her hole in the _sahuaro_ carries not even so far as the watching hawk on nearby skeleton _ocatilla_ stalk. The meat cry of the prowling cat in the mountains where the wild sheep range is swallowed in the muffling depths of the canyon under her feet. Thin air seems too tenuous to conduct sound waves. Creatures of the wild lands move mute under the oppression of unbounded space. Yet nowhere does rumour fly swifter than here in this vacant land. Comes a strange prowler to the waterholes of Tinajas Altas, and the antelope fifty miles away know the news and seek the hidden springs at Bates’ Wells. A Papago three days’ journey from the nearest rancheria stumbles onto hoofprints of six horses away over where tidewater climbs into the delta of the Colorado, and he turns back to carry report of revolution in Baja California. Strange signs tell their tales from the sands; the arrangement of little sticks conveys whole chapters of information to the wayfarer. When man meets man, be he white, brown or copper coloured, news is a torch to be passed on to a new hand. Nothing can be long a secret. The latent must out.