Even as he spoke the rocky walls of the Canyon resounded with the crash of a score of firearms. The driver, with a convulsive gasp, toppled forward out of his seat, his hand still clinching the reins. One of the troopers clapped his hand to his forehead, his reins falling useless upon his horse's neck, and reeled in the saddle as his charger whirled about and rushed, snorting with fright, down the narrow road. At the instant of the firing the sound of a dozen “spats” told where the leaden missiles had torn through the stiff canvas cover of the ambulance; and Sherrick, with blanched face, leaped from the riddled vehicle and plunged heavily forward upon his hands and knees. Two of the troopers sprang from their saddles, and, crouching behind a boulder across the road, opened fire up the opposite hillside. The sergeant and his comrade, bending low over their horses' necks, came thundering back down the Canyon, just in time to see the mules whirl about so suddenly as to throw the ambulance on its side. The iron safe was hurled into the shallow ditch; the wagon bed dragged across the prostrate form of the paymaster, rolling him over and over half a dozen times, and then, with a wreck of canvas, splinters, chains and traces clattering at their heels, the four mules went rattling away down the gorge. [Illustration: 0047] “Jump for shelter, men!” shouted Sergeant Edwards, as he dragged the senseless form of the major under the great ledge to the right. “Stand them off as long as you can! Come out of your holes, you cowardly hounds!” he roared, shaking his fist at the smoke-wreathed rocks up the heights. “Come out and fight fair! There's only five of us left!” Here in the road lay the major, bleeding from cuts and bruises, with every breath knocked out of his battered body; yonder, his hands 'clinched in the death agony, the stiffening form of the driver--plucky to the last. Twenty yards away down the road, all in a heap, lay one poor soldier shot through the head, and now past praying for. One of the others was bleeding from a gash along the cheek where a bullet had zipped its way, and Edwards shouted in vain for Staines to join them; the clerk had disappeared. For full five minutes the desperate combat was maintained; the sergeant and his little squad crouching behind the nearest rocks and firing whenever head or sombrero showed itself along the heights. Then came shots from the rear, and another poor fellow was laid low, and Edwards realized, to his despair, that the bandits were on every side, and the result only a question of time.