The carbines were banging, as the first troop began to fight――officers shouted, the man in the canvas suit jumped out, yelled orders and pointed, and leveled his shot-gun――“Bang!” The first troop, dismounted to the notes of a bugle, deployed on, firing, another troop was spurring in at a gallop――and the Tontos were scampering off through the timber. Jimmie was just about to spring upright, glad, when Micky nudged him hard, in warning. Not all the Tontos had gone. The two who had dropped into ambush among the rocks at the timber edge had been cut off by the cavalry, and were now running back, and dancing and dodging, their heads turned. “Don’t shoot them!” shouted the canvas suit man, in a loud voice. “We have them!” He was running, too――and his officers――and the foremost of the men――from tree to tree, after them, to surround them at the edge of the basin. The two Tontos had crouched, again, behind a large boulder. Jimmie might have tossed a stone and struck them; they were close in front of him and Micky, and fully exposed, against the boulder. But the soldiers had formed a half circle, hemming them in against the basin’s edge. Up straightened the two Tontos, behind their rock, drew their bows to the arrows’ heads, and stood, at bay, aiming now here, now there, threatening their enemies. “Don’t shoot them!” the canvas suit man kept shouting. “Take them alive.” And he called to the Tontos: “Friends! Friends!” However, the two Tontos would have none of _that_. They stood braced, with bended bows, glaring from tangled hair, as defiant and menacing as a coiled rattle-snake. On a sudden――“Twang!”――they had loosed their arrows, and with a single backward spring and another bound had disappeared over the edge! Evidently they preferred death to capture――they certainly had killed themselves, for the basin looked to be a sheer drop of over a thousand feet. Out bolted Jimmie and ran, the better to see. Forward ran the canvas suit man and his officers and the soldiers. And there were the two Tontos, alive and running, themselves. They were leaping and bounding like rabbits, from rock to rock and landing-place to landing-place of the merest trail zigzagging them almost straight up and down! that must have been the trail which all the Tontos had climbed. For a moment everybody was too astonished to shoot. Then――“Bang!” The canvas suit man had thrown his gun to his shoulder, lightning-quick, and aimed and pulled trigger. The second of the two Tontos leaped aside, one arm fell limp, and was dyed red. But he did not slacken. Now “Bang! Bang! Bang-bang!” The soldiers and the officers also shot as fast as they could, so that even the basin echoed. They were excited, and shooting down-hill, the Tontos were leaping and dodging and looked very small, not much larger than coyotes; and as far as anybody might see, not a bullet touched them.