He was ripped out of sleep by a full-powered neigh from Mamie. He sat up--moonlight whiter than ever upon the empty patio. Faintly he could see the mare standing in the thin shadows--that high-held listening head--the arch of her crest. He heard a horse answer from a distance, probably from the picket-line of the rurales across the town. A sentry walking past, back and forth across the entrance to the arch, paused, but resumed his pacing again. Now, slowly, on the low roof of the cells opposite, a human figure lifted--then another. Mamie nickered; the figures flattened again. This time horses answered from both sides of the town. The sentry was slower to resume his pacing. Elbert rubbed his eyes. The two figures on hands and knees were now moving cautiously forward on the roof of the cells toward the arch. They came to halt, as the sentry approached below. Slow seconds, Mamie dancing nervously back and forth on her tether. From one of the cells came a low grumbling at the disturbance she made--then the launching of the nearer and shorter figure from the roof, to the shoulders of the sentry, as the latter reached the turning-point of his post below. Hardly a scream. The sentry was stretched upon the turf; the other rising from it. The second and taller stranger, meanwhile, had dropped down from the roof and vanished under the arch. Sleepy voices from the cells; a hissing command to silence; the name of Monte Vallejo spoken--another demand for silence in a tone of suppressed fury. And now the taller of the two strangers reappeared from under the arch, leading by the hand a second sentry, who proved to have in his hands the keys of the cells. The name of Monte Vallejo seemed on every lip. Some of the prisoners in the cells appeared to know the two who had come, but kept repeating that Monte Vallejo was dead. Could it be possible that these two strangers had not heard? With this question in his brain, Elbert began to realize that the two who had come over the roof were of Vallejo’s band--on a long chance to rescue their chief. The soldier with the keys was now being forced to unlock the cells, and the way of this forcing by the tall bandit, began to fascinate Elbert in spite of his own suffocating tension. No savagery about it; the voice was cool, hasteless. Lilt and leisure in his words, as he forced the sentry from cell to cell, twirling a gun on his first finger. ‘He could fan it, too--’ an old sentence of Bob Leadley’s flashed through Elbert’s brain. The shorter bandit now hurried up, breathlessly reiterating the fact of Monte Vallejo’s death. ‘So I hear,’ said the tall one, ‘but we can turn loose the boys still alive, can’t we?’ ‘But the soldiers are awaking, Señor--’