Along the top of a tall boulder to their right appeared a dark red line—the arm of a savage, with clutching fingers. Above it, very slowly and cautiously, there rose first an eagle’s feather, then coarse black scalp lock, then a high forehead and fierce eyes. The echo of Landless’s shot reverberated through the cliffs, and when the smoke cleared only the bare gray boulder faced him. But from behind it came a derisive yell. "Thou wilt think me a poor marksman, my dear," he said, smiling, as he reloaded his musket. "I have missed again." "It is because you are wounded," she said. "I would I had thy wounds." "I had a wounded heart, but you have healed it," he said, and looked at her with shining eyes. The sun sank and the long twilight of the hills set in. The evening star was brightening through the pale amethyst of the sky when Landless said quietly: "The last charge," and emptied it into an arm which for one incautious moment had waved above the rocks. "It is the end, then," said Patricia. "Yes, it is the end. We have beaten them back for the moment, but presently they will find that all we could do we have done, and then—" She left her post beside the gap in the front, and came and knelt beside him, and he took her in his arms. "It is not Death before us, but Life," she said in a low voice. "It is God and Love, naught else," he answered. "But the river between will be bitter for you to cross, sweetheart." "We cross it together," she said, "and so—" She raised her head that he might see her radiant smile, and their lips met. "Hark!" she said directly with her hand on his. "What is that sound?" He shook his head. "The wind has risen, and the forest rustles and sighs. There is nothing more." "It is far off," she answered, "but it is like the dip of oars. Ah!" Over against them, framed in the narrow opening between the rocks, his lithe, half-nude figure dark against the crimson west, and with a smile upon his evil lips and in his evil eyes, stood Luiz Sebastian. In the dead silence that succeeded he looked with a smiling countenance from the musket, now useless and thrown aside, to his enemy, wounded and unarmed save for a knife, and to the woman in that enemy’s arms; then, without turning, he said a few words in an Indian tongue. From the dusky mass behind him came one short, wild cry of savage triumph, followed by another dead silence. Still holding Patricia in one arm, Landless rose from his knee, and stood confronting him. "We are met again, Señor Landless," said Luiz Sebastian smoothly. Receiving no answer, he spoke again with a tigerish expansion of his thick lips. "You have had an accident, I see. Mother of God! that foot must pain you! But you will forget it presently in the pleasure of the pine splinters."