Down below in the camp all was bustle and confusion. Men who were to be on guard while El Diablo was away had been arriving since the night before.

Machine guns had been erected on the pass and at various other vantage points of the mountain. The two hundred gauchos, who were to ride with El Diablo, were determined to make themselves conspicuous in Jācara. All wore their best clothes and what they did not possess they had borrowed from their friends.

Their harnesses, stirrups and saddles were bright with silver, polished until in the sun they were almost too bright to look at in comfort. Their spurs and cuchillos too were dazzling. All wore their gayest and most colourful ponchos of blue, green, crimson, yellow or striped wool.

They were a colourful band who swung themselves into their saddles amid the cheers and cries of those who were to be left behind.

Only El Diablo wore his ordinary clothes, the well-cut tweed jacket, whipcord breeches and highly polished boots. There was silver on his harness and on his stirrups.

Skye knew that the gauchos would have felt that he lost face if he had used anything plainer. Although in some parts of the country the custom was dying out, they all of them in their hearts still considered that silver ornamentation a sign of importance.

Yet there was no need for El Diablo to have anything to proclaim him their leader, Skye thought, as he rode ahead with his horsemen out of the pass that led from the camp.

His expression was serious and grave as he took a last look round the defences and stopped to give his final instructions to the sentries. He was anxious, she could see that, and she knew that there had been a dozen and one crises to be dealt with at the last moment.

There was a vast amount of organisation to be done for such an expedition apart from the worry and concern of planning the defences of the camp and leaving instructions as to what should be done in case of attack.

Information had been coming in up to the last moment. There had been an almost constant stream of horsemen riding from the hacienda where the telephone was situated and an equal number had come direct from Jācara.

Everything rested on one man’s shoulders, Skye thought and then, because perhaps for the first time she was thinking of El Diablo rather than of herself, she spurred her horse forward to ride alongside him as they reached the plain.

“Is everything all right?” she asked.

He glanced at her and what he saw seemed to soften the grimness of his expression.

“I can only hope that I have thought of everything,” he replied.

There was a flatness about his tone and deliberately to ease the tension under which he was suffering she drew attention to herself.