and water to bathe in. We could
hardly be better off anywhere."

Drummond looked curiously about him, so far as was possible without
moving his pain-stricken head. He was lying in a deep recess in some
dark and rocky canon whose sides were vertical walls. Tumbling down
from the wooded heights above--rare sight in Arizona--a little brook
of clear, sparkling water came brawling and plashing over its stony
bed at his feet and went on down the gorge to its opening on the sandy
plain. There, presumably, it burrowed into the bosom of the earth, for
no vestige of running stream could the Cababi Valley show. The walls
about him were in places grimy with the smoke of cook fires. Overhead,
not fifty feet away, a gnarled and stunted little cedar jutted out
from some crevice in the rocks and stood at the edge of the cliff. A
soldier was clinging to it with one hand and pointing out towards the
east with the other. Drummond recognized the voice as that of one of
his own troop when the man called out,--

"Two of our fellers are coming with the old yellow ambulance,
sergeant; but I can't see the others."

"All right, Patterson. Try to see where the rest have gone and what
they're doing. I'll send the glass up to you presently. What I'm
afraid of, lieutenant, is that in their rage over Donovan's death, and
Mullan's, and all the devil's work done there at Moreno's, and your
mishap, too, the men have become uncontrollable, and will never let up
on the pursuit until they have killed the last one of that gang. These
two who are coming in with the bodies of the Morales brothers
probably have worn-out horses, or perhaps Lee ordered them to stay and
guard the safe. The last I saw of any of the gang they were
disappearing over the desert to the south, striking for Sonora Pass."

"I wonder they didn't all come in here," said Drummond.

"Well, hardly that, lieutenant. They knew they would be followed here,
penned up, where their capture would only be a question of time. A
hundred cavalrymen would be around them in a very few hours, and we
could send to Lowell for those old mountain howitzers and just
leisurely shell them out. Then, when they surrendered,--as they'd have
to,--the civil authorities would immediately step in and claim
jurisdiction, claim the prisoners, too. We'd simply have to turn them
over to justice as a matter of course, and you know, and they know,
that the only judge apt to sit on their case would be that of our
eminent