ifted down on the leathery
mesquite and dagger plants below.

"I don't like the looks o' that brush down there," said the other man
on the box. He was an express guard, and across his knees was a
sawed-off shotgun loaded with buckshot.

"Perfect place fer an ambush, ain't it?" admitted the driver. "Well,
if the Apaches do git us, I will say they'll make a nice haul."

It was a dangerous time on the great Southwest frontier. Law had not
yet come to that savage country of flaming desert and baking mountain.
Even a worse peril than the operations of the renegades and bad men of
the border was the threat of the Apaches. Behind any clump of
mesquites a body of these grim and terrible fighters of the arid lands
might lurk, eager for murder and robbery. And it was rumored that a
chief even more cruel than Geronimo, Cochise, or Mangus Colorado was at
their head.

The men who operated the stage line knew the risk they were taking in
that unbroken country, but they were of the type that could look danger
in the face and laugh. The two steely-eyed men on the coach box, this
gray morning, were samples of the breed.

Inside the vehicle were four passengers. Three of them were men past
middle life--miners and cattlemen. The third was a youth who addressed
one of the older men as "father." All were armed with six-guns, and
all were bound for the valley of San Simon.

The stage had reached the bottom of the hill now, and as the team
reached the level ground, the driver lined them out and settled back in
his seat with a satisfied grunt. About both sides of the trail at this
point grew great thickets of brush--paloverde, the darker mesquites,
and grotesque bunches of prickly pear. One of the bronchos suddenly
reared backward.

"Steady, yuh ornery----" the driver began.

He did not finish. There was a sharp twang! An arrow whistled out of
the mesquites and buried itself in the side of the coach nearly to the
feather! As if this were a signal, a dozen rifles cracked out from the
brush. Bowstrings snapped, and a shower of arrows and lead hummed
around the heads of the frightened ponies. The driver cried out in
pain as a bullet hit his leg.

"Apaches!" the express guard yelled, throwing up his sawed-off shotgun.

Two streaks of red fire darted through the haze of black powder smoke
as he fired both barrels into the brush. The driver recovered himself,
seized the reins and began to "pour leather" onto his fear-cra