ted out to her so strongly the necessity of her remaining
to wait for the return of the soldiers that, being also fagged out
by her long climb, she obediently consented, while he, even with
his inspiration of the truth, did not believe in the return of the
despoilers, and knew she would be safe.

He made his way to the nearest thicket, where he rightly believed the
ambush had been prepared, and to which undoubtedly they first retreated
with their booty. He expected to find some signs or traces of their
spoil which in their haste they had to abandon. He was more successful
than he anticipated. A few steps into the thicket brought him full
upon a realization of more than his worst convictions--the dead body of
Foster! Near it lay the body of the mail agent. Both had been evidently
dragged into the thicket from where they fell, scalped and half
stripped. There was no evidence of any later struggle; they must have
been dead when they were brought there.

Boyle was neither a hard-hearted nor an unduly sensitive man. His
vocation had brought him peril enough by land and water; he had often
rendered valuable assistance to others, his sympathy never confusing his
directness and common sense. He was sorry for these two men, and would
have fought to save them. But he had no imaginative ideas of death. And
his keen perception of the truth was consequently sensitively alive only
to that grotesqueness of aspect which too often the hapless victims of
violence are apt to assume. He saw no agony in the vacant eyes of the
two men lying on their backs in apparently the complacent abandonment of
drunkenness, which was further simulated by their tumbled and disordered
hair matted by coagulated blood, which, however, had lost its sanguine
color. He thought only of the unsuspecting girl sitting in the lonely
coach, and hurriedly dragged them further into the bushes. In doing this
he discovered a loaded revolver and a flask of spirits which had been
lying under them, and promptly secured them. A few paces away lay the
coveted trunks of arms and ammunition, their lids wrenched off and
their contents gone. He noticed with a grim smile that his own trunks of
samples had shared a like fate, but was delighted to find that while the
brighter trifles had attracted the Indians' childish cupidity they
had overlooked a heavy black merino shawl of a cheap but serviceable
quality. It would help to protect Miss Cantire from the evening wind,
which was al