he Casa to Coronado's room, found all safe there, and
returned, stumbling over bodies both going and coming. At last the slow
dawn came and sent a faint, faint radiance through the door, enabling the
benighted eyes within to discover one dolorous object after another. In
the centre of the room lay the boy Shubert, perfectly motionless and no
doubt dead. Here and there, slowly revealing themselves through the
diminishing darkness, like horrible waifs left uncovered by a falling
river, appeared the bodies of four Apaches, naked to the breechcloth and
painted black, all quiet except one which twitched convulsively. The clay
floor was marked by black pools and stains which were undoubtedly blood.
Other fearful blotches were scattered along the entrance, as if grievously
wounded men had tottered through it, or slain warriors had been dragged
out by their comrades.

While the battle is still in suspense a soldier looks with but faint
emotion, and almost without pity, upon the dead and wounded. They are
natural; they belong to the scene; what else should he see? Moreover, the
essential sentiments of the time and place are, first, a hard egoism which
thinks mainly of self-preservation, and second, a stern sense of duty
which regulates it. In the fiercer moments of the conflict even these
feelings are drowned in a wild excitement which may lie either exultation
or terror. Thus it is that the ordinary sympathies of humanity for the
suffering and for the dead are suspended.

Looking at Shubert, our lieutenant simply said to himself, "I have lost a
man. My command is weakened by so much." Then his mind turned with
promptness to the still living and urgent incidents of the situation.
Could he peep out of the doorway without getting an arrow through the
head? Was the roof of the Casa safe from escalade? Were any of his people
wounded?

This last question he at once put in English and Spanish. Kelly replied,
"Slightly, sir," and pointed to his left shoulder, pretty smartly laid
open by the thrust of a knife. One of the Indian muleteers, who was
sitting propped up in a corner, faintly raised his head and showed a
horrible gash in his thigh. At a sign from Thurstane another muleteer
bound up the wound with the sleeve of Shubert's shirt, which he slashed
off for the purpose. Kelly said, "Never mind me, sir; it's no great
affair, sir."

"Two killed and two wounded," thought the lieutenant. "We are losing more
than our proportion."