st grazing the bone, and who, despite the
fact that Fanny Harvey early in the night had every now and then crept
noiselessly in to cool his fevered head, seemed strangely affected
mentally, seemed unnaturally flighty and wandering, seemed oppressed
or excited alternately in a way that baffled Drummond completely, for
no explanation was plausible. Two or three times during the night he
had been heard moaning, and yet the moment Drummond or, as once
happened, Miss Harvey hastened to his side, he declared it was
nothing. "I must have been dozing and imagined the pain was greater
than it was." Awake and conscious, so stout a soldier as he would be
the last to give way to childish exhibition of suffering, yet twice
Drummond knew him to be awake despite his protestation of dozing, and
he did not at all like it that Wing should bury his face in his arms,
hiding it from all. What could have occurred to change this buoyant,
joyous, high-spirited trooper all on a sudden into a sighing, moaning,
womanish fellow? Surely not a wound of which, however painful, any
soldier might be proud.

Somewhere along towards four o'clock, when it was again Patterson's
watch and Drummond arose from his blanket after a refreshing sleep of
nearly two hours and he and his faithful sentry were standing just
outside the mouth of the cave, they distinctly heard the same moan of
distress.

"Is there nothing we can do to ease the sergeant, sir?" whispered
Patterson. "This makes the second time I have heard him groaning, and
it's so unlike him."

"We have no opiates, and I doubt if he would use one if we had. He
declares there is no intense pain."

"Well, first off, sir, I thought he was dreaming, but he was wide
awake, and Miss Harvey came in only a moment after I got to him. Could
those devils poison a bullet as they do their arrows, and could that
make him go into fever so soon?"

"I hardly think so; but why did you say dreaming?"

"Because once it was 'mother' he called, and again--just now--I
thought he said mother."

The lieutenant turned, looking straight at his soldierly subordinate.

"By Jove! Patterson, so did I."

There was a little stir across the canon. Moreno was edging about
uneasily and beginning to mutter blasphemy at his bonds.

"That fellow begged very hard to be moved down into that wolf-hole of
a place where the Mexican women are, lieutenant, with those two
bunged-up bandits to take care of. Nice time we'd have, sir, if th