Although a large man, Gabriel was lithe and active, and dropped the intervening distance where the rope was scant, lightly, and without injury. Happily the falling of the statue was looked upon as the result of another earthquake shock, and its disastrous effect upon the storming party for awhile checked the attack. Gabriel lifted his half-fainting ally in his arms, and gaining the friendly shelter of the ditch, in ten minutes was beyond the confines of One Horse Gulch, and in the shadow of the pines of Conroy's Hill. There were several tunnel openings only known to him. Luckily the first was partly screened by a fall of rock loosened by the earthquake from the hill above, and satisfied that it would be unrecognised by any eye less keen than his own, Gabriel turned into it with his fainting burden. And it was high time. For the hæmorrhage from Jack Hamlin's wound was so great that that gentleman, after a faint attempt to wave his battered hat above his dishevelled curls, suddenly succumbed, and lay as cold and senseless and beautiful as a carven Apollo. Then Gabriel stripped him, and found an ugly hole in his thigh that had narrowly escaped traversing the femoral artery, and set himself about that rude surgery which he had acquired by experience, and that more delicate nursing which was instinctive with him. He was shocked at the revelation of a degree of emaciation in the figure of this young fellow that he had not before suspected. Gabriel had nursed many sick men, and here was one who clearly ought to be under the doctor's hands, economising his vitality as a sedentary invalid, who had shown himself to him hitherto only as a man of superabundant activity and animal spirits. Whence came the power that had animated this fragile shell? Gabriel was perplexed; he looked down upon his own huge frame with a new and sudden sense of apology and depreciation, as if it were an offence to this spare and bloodless Adonis.