on the bed of pith at his feet. Don José was then praying, his face turned to the east, where no doubt he trusted to behold a less unhappy sun than had last scorched them.

Suddenly don Benito started: something like a hot snake had run down his cheek and buried itself in his bosom. At almost the same instant, whilst he was awakening fully, a smart sting in the left shoulder, preceded by a hissing, short and angry, made the young man utter an exclamation rather in rage than pain.

The sun had risen; at least, he could see about him and be warmed and vivified a little, through a fresh day commenced of intolerable torments.

As he looked up, the repetition of the sensation of the reptile gliding adown his face, but less warm and more slow this time, caused him to apply his hand to the line traversed. He withdrew it speedily, and in disgust—his fingers were smeared with blood!

"Oh, Don José!" he ejaculated. "Dolores, dear!"

Stupefied, speechless, like a statue, the girl upon the natural pedestal was supporting the lifeless body of the old Mexican. An arrow was broken off in his temple, and his beard, roughly sprouted out and white with this week of hardship, was flooded with the blackening blood of which Benito in his post below had received the drip.

The young man stared fiercely around, and instantly perceiving something on the move in the thicket, sprang up the tree.

At the same time aimed at him to redeem the marksman for his first failure, which had lodged the shaft in the young Mexican's shoulder instead of his head or his heart; a second projectile of the same description whizzed into the gap between his legs, opened by his leap, and smote a knot so violently as to shiver into a dozen splinters.

Unable for want of strength to keep his hold, the youthful Mexican slipped down to the ground. Then, facing about in frenzy of indignation, as being so badgered by the unknown, he called out savagely:

"Coward! Confront the last of your victims, if you have a drop of manly blood!"

Because he had concluded his last shot serious, or from disdain for his antagonist, or sheer recklessness—for it is not likely that a savage so far forgot his training as to let such a white man's taunt sting him into the imprudence—the Indian who had dogged the unfortunate trio stalked out of the underwood, and only ceased his advance when a lance length from the desperate man who had invoked him.

"¡Presente!" he said in Spanish, with a hoarse chuckle, as in one glance he saw the insensible young female form beside the dead Mexican, and don Benito's weak condition.

Indeed, the latter, instead of carrying out his implied threat, tottered back and leaned against the cottonwood, just under one arrow, and with the other shattered shaft bristling at his shoulder.

The red man chose to interpret this movement as a flattery for his warlike appearance, for he smiled contentedly, and, drawing his long knife, cried holding up three fingers of his left hand:

"La Garra de Rapina—the Claw of Rapine—will now take his harvest for thrice five days' toil."

Benito sought to summon his failing powers, but a mist seemed to spring up and becloud his gaze, through which he less and less clearly saw the Indian's slow and cruel approach. Nevertheless, he was about to make a snatch at hazard for the steel that rose over his bosom, when a flash of fire from a gun so near that he almost saw the hither extremity blind the redskin, preceded a shot that crashed through the latter's skull. Benito, unable to check his own leap, received the dead yet convulsed body in his arms, and the shock hurled him to the ground. Neither rose! One was dead; the other within an ace of the same impassable portals. It seemed to him, as he lost consciousness, that there was a struggle in the brush.

When Benito reopened his eyes he believed all had been a dream, but, on gazing anxiously about him, he saw the dead Indian by his side. Above him, too, when he rose on his knees by an effort, the two silent witnesses of his miraculous deliverance were still recumbent.

No trace of another living soul; nevertheless, the Indian's weapons had all disappeared.

Suddenly, as he lifted himself to his feet, aching all over as if he had been bastinadoed on every accessible place, he heard Dolores moan. She was animated by the acute racking of hunger.

He gasped, "Food! Food for her!" and reeled to the greenest spot, where he began to tear up the earth with his nails. At length he dislodged a little stem of yucca, the somewhat tasty root which yields a species of maniac.

When he returned to the tree, Dolores, horrified at seeing her father's blood, had fallen off the tree top, rather than climbed down, and was too insensible to hear his appeals. He dragged the Indian's body partly aside, for to do so wholly was too weighty a task, and heaped leaves over the other portion. He placed the root in Dolores' passive hands, and was about to repeat his hoarse babble of hope, which he did not feel at heart, when abruptly the arrow wound in his shoulder gave a sharp, deep, scorching sensation, which filled him from head to sole with fever and awe.

"Oh, heavens!" he groaned. "The arrow was poisoned! I shall die in madness! I shall, perhaps, tear her, my dear Dolores, in my blind, ungovernable rage!"

So feels the man whom hydrophobia has seized upon, as the latest promptings of reason bid him hie aloof from his endangered fellows.

Benito laid his glances about him wildly; his recently dull eyes blazed till his very features, already earthy, lit up, and he howled;

"Welcome, death! But anywhere save here!"

He trampled on the Indian corpse in his flight, and plunged into the thorns as if bent on rending himself to shreds. He must have rushed madly on for half an hour, the venom firing his thinned blood till his veins ran flames, but as the wound on his left side affected that portion of the frame disproportionately, he described a circle, and in the end had almost returned to the spot where Dolores still rested in a swoon.

At last, stumbling, groping, he fell, only to crawl a little way, then, a slight mound opposing his hands and knees, he rolled upon it. His head appeared to have been cleared by the Mazeppa-like course, and he was, at least, conscious of the raised grass reminding him of a funeral mound.

"A grave!" he breathed, dashing the sweat out of his eyes, "Yes, a grave here will the last of the Bustamentes die!"

He stretched out at full length, he folded his arms, one of them palsied already, and was beginning to pray, when his tone changed to joy, or at least, profound hopefulness. He fell over on his side, then rose to his knees, ran his band over the mound eagerly, and cried:

"God of mercy, deceive me not! The grave I coveted, is it not a cache? Thank God!"

CHAPTER III.

THE PIRATE'S BEQUEST.

The wanderer whose careless progress through the brake sufficiently clearly revealed that he was a stranger of a bold heart and contempt for customs different from his own, was, in fact, one of those Englishmen who seem born to illustrate, in the nature of exceptions, the formal character of his race.

Left an orphan in the fetters of a trustee who forgot he had ever been young, and showed no sympathy with his charge, George Frederick Gladsden had broken his bondage and run away from school at the age of twelve. Reaching a Scotch port, after a long tramp, he shipped as boy on a herring fisher, and so made his novitiate with Neptune. After that initiation, very severe, he chose to become a sailor of that irregular kind which is known as the pier head jumping. That is to say, instead of duly entering on a vessel and book at the office in broad daylight, "George" would lounge on the wharf till the very moment of her casting off. Then, of course, the captain is happy to take anybody in the least nautical or even