But, as I say, the tone of the man’s voice breaking in on my thoughts and terrors was peculiar, and, with my head still as low in my shoulders as I could manage to hold it, I laid my cheek to the hot sand and looked at him. He had turned to the man who had been standing by me, but at sound of the shot had dropped to his knees. "Does it look bad?" said he, drawing his finger across his forehead, where was a tiny mark, and then holding out his hand and looking on it for traces of blood, raising up his face for inspection by the man beside me at the same time, and a question in his eyes, very much as you have seen a child, "Is my face clean, mother?" Yes, and with a very childish voice, too. "It don’t look bad," was the reply—and neither it did. But when he turned away again to the other sentry who lay further off, repeating his question to him in that simple voice, I saw the back of his head. And his brains were dribbling out behind upon his neck. A terrible weakness filled my heart. I heard him say, with no oath, as one might have expected, but in a soft voice: "Dear me!" and again, "Dear me! How very dark it is getting!" Which was an awful word to hear with the sun blazing right in his eyes out of the burnished, palpitating sky. And then he put it as a question and still with the note of astonishment: "Dear me, isn’t that strange? Is n’t it getting very——" and he sank forward on his face; but what followed I do not know. In the terror of my own position I kept all my faculties alert; but at the sight of that man’s back and the bloody wound, and at the childish voice of him, the world seemed to wheel. A sickness came on me and I fainted away. *CHAPTER XII* _*I Am Held as a Hostage*_ It must have been more of a momentary squeamishness, that, rather than a fainting fit, I think; for I heard myself moan twice, was conscious of the moaning. There seemed something pressing on my heart and forcing me to gasp for breath and relieve the tension on it. A sweat broke on me then, and after that I felt myself, as it were, swinging through space, and with another gasp and a great gulp of air the world spun back again and there I lay, the cold sweat standing on my brow, and the rattlesnake coiling afresh. "Why! What’s this move now?" I heard one of my captors cry. "What’s he doin’ with his rifle carried and waggling his hand in the air that ways?" "Don’t you know what that is? That’s the peace sign—flat of the hand held up, palm open and pushed forward wi’ that there kind o’ to-and-fro movement." "Peace sign be durned! If I was sure we could get the information out of this here kid laying behind us, I’d put a bullet through his skull and let out his brains—front of his face or back of his neck like Cockeye there—all the same to me." "Reckon you ’d be safer not to do that." "Think the kid here won’t speak, then?"