and the blare of cavalry trumpet.

Then the colonel turned to Plume, standing now silent and sore
troubled. "It was the quickest way," he said apologetically.
"Ordinarily I should have given the order through you, of course. But
those beggars are armed to a man. They left their guns in the crevices
of yonder rocks, probably, when they came for the morning music. We
must have no fight over this unless they force it. I wish to heaven we
hadn't killed--these two," and ruefully he looked at the stark
forms--the dead lover of Natzie, the gasping tribesman just beyond,
dying, knife in hand. "The general has been trying to curb Daly for
the last ten days," continued he, "and warned him he'd bring on
trouble. The interpreter split with him on Monday last, and there's
been mischief brewing ever since. If only we could have kept Blakely
there--all this row would have been averted!"

If only, indeed! was Plume thinking, as eagerly, anxiously he scanned
the eastward shore, rising jagged, rocky, and forbidding from the
willows of the stream bed. If only, indeed! Not only all this row of
which Byrne had seen so much, but all this other row, this row within
a row, this intricacy of mishaps and misery that involved the social
universe of Camp Sandy, of which as yet the colonel, presumably, knew
so very little; of which, as post commander, Plume had yet to tell
him! An orderly came running with a field glass and a scrap of paper.
Plume glanced at the latter, a pencil scrawl of his wife's inseparable
companion, and, for aught he knew, confidante. "Madame," he could make
out, and "_affreusement_" something, but it was enough. The orderly
supplemented: "Leece, sir, says the lady is very bad--"

"Go to her, Plume," with startling promptitude cried the colonel.
"I'll look to everything here. It's all coming out right," for with a
tantara--tantara-ra-ra Sanders's troop, spreading far and wide, were
scrambling up the shaly slopes a thousand yards away. "Go to your wife
and tell her the danger's over," and, with hardly another glance at
the moaning agent, now being limply hoisted on a hospital stretcher,
thankfully the major went. "The lady's very bad, is she?" growled
Byrne, in fierce aside to Graham. "That French hag sometimes speaks
truth, in spite of herself. How d'you find him?" This with a toss of
the head toward the vanishing stretcher.

"Bad likewise. These Apache knives dig deep. There's Mullins now--"

"Think _that_ was Apache?"