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"We shall have to respond in kind!" said Jack. He left his hat where his head had been and began crawling along the side of the arroyo, but paused to call to Prather, who, now that no bullets were flying, was trying the mechanism of his rifle with a somewhat steadier hand: "Prather, if you could manage to get up there beside Firio and join him in pouring out a magazine full at the right moment, it would help!
Swiftly he ran, dodging among the catclaw and the prickly pear like a half-back carrying the ball through a broken field. His objective was the place where the arroyo opened to a draw. At this precise spot Steelman had located his derrick. The tower no longer tapered gauntly to the sky.
"I knowed he'd git hurt," he explained to the bandage, torn from the edge of his kerchief, which he carefully bound around his last wound. Down in the arroyo Johnny was complaining. "This yer's a no good bunk," he plaintively remarked. "It shore ain't but it's th' best we kin find," apologized Billy. "That's th' sixth that feller sent up there.
He was lame and sore from his fall of the day before, and tired and hungry from the day's discomforts, but he managed to say enough to give them an idea of what had happened. "After I climbed out of the arroyo," he said, "I didn't know which way to go. If those fellows had got Polly I wanted to go after them; if they hadn't well, I didn't dare take the chance that they hadn't.
This had narrowed so that between the steep hills there was only room for the arroyo and the little roadway beside it. Before the rain began to fall on Lola's bare head, as it did shortly in sheets, the stream-bed had become a raging torrent, down which froth and spume and uprooted saplings were spinning.
The main advance was to be along the military road from Ponce to San Juan. As this road runs for some distance parallel to the southern coast, a division was dispatched under General Brooke to land at Arroyo and capture Guayama, an important city on the military road, about forty miles east of Ponce.
Something in the man's gait and costume struck Prince. "That fellow's no Injun," he called to his friend. "Look!" Thursday was pointing to the saddle-back between two peaks at the head of the arroyo. A girl on horseback had just come over the summit and stood silhouetted against the sky. Even in that moment while they watched her she realized for the first time her danger.
The dusty haze that had arisen had passed as mysteriously away; the clear outline of the valley returned; the great field was empty! Presently I was aware of the sound of galloping hoofs. I remembered then what I had at first forgotten that a few moments before we had crossed an arroyo, or dried bed of a stream, depressed below the level of the field. How foolish that I had not remembered!
That gave Blizzard his chance to make the shelter of the arroyo. Suddenly it yawned at their feet a terrific jump. Would Blizzard take it? A reassuring pressure of a knee was all the inspiration the horse needed. They seemed to rush through the air. Then they were sliding down the bank in a cloud of dust, Blizzard tense and stiff-legged.
Silently and swiftly they toiled. It was risky work, too, at night and in the tense haste. There was a muttered exclamation a heavy case had dropped! a man had gone down with a broken leg. It was a common thing with the gun-runners. The crew of the Arroyo had expected it. The victim of such an accident could not be sent to a hospital ashore.
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