The young lady let her head drop but said nothing, and the three riders started at full gallop in the direction of the shots, which became more frequent the nearer they approached. They were soon close enough to distinguish all the details of the drama which was being performed but a few paces from them. At the top of a small mound, several Europeans, who could be easily recognized by their dress, ambuscaded behind their horses, whose throats they had cut to form them into a barricade, were defending themselves like lions against twenty Indian warriors, who surrounded and tried to capture them. "Well?" Doña Emilia asked her daughter, as she pointed to this fight, whose incidents were growing more and more striking, "Is that a snare?" "I am wrong, mother, I see," the young lady murmured; "and yet, I repeat, I am afraid." "Forward!" Doña Emilia cried. The three riders passed like a hurricane through the midst of the redskins, throwing down and trampling on all who tried to oppose their passage. But then a strange and terrible thing took place. Several shots, doubtless badly aimed and fired from the top of the mound where the Europeans were entrenched, struck in the head the horses of Doña Emilia and her daughter, who rolled on the ground unable to rise; at the same moment an Indian warrior dashed at Don Melchior, brandishing his lasso over his head. All at once the young man felt a frightful shock, was lifted from the saddle by an irresistible force, and dragged along the ground. Don Melchior had been lassoed. In spite of the horrible suffering he endured, though half strangled by the slip knot which squeezed his throat, though wounded by roots and stones over which his pitiless conqueror dragged him, the young man did not lose his presence of mind; by an extraordinary and superhuman effort, which only the certainty of a horrible death would give him the courage to attempt, Don Melchior clutched the fatal lasso with one hand, and with the other seizing the sharp knife which every Mexican carries in his boot, as a last resource, he succeeded in drawing it out, and, after two fruitless attempts, collecting all his strength for a final effort, he managed to cut the lasso; then, without calculating the consequences of his deed, but preferring to run the chances of an immediate death, however terrible it might be, to falling alive into the hands of his ferocious enemies, he recommended his soul to heaven in a mental prayer, and rolled down the incline of a precipice which yawned a couple of yards from him.