nd cursing by
turns, has rolled himself out of his nook and lies squarely in the way
of everything and everybody. But above all the clamor, the ring of
carbine, the hiss and spat of lead flattening upon the rocks,
Drummond's voice is heard clear and commanding, serene and confident.

"Every man to his post now. Remember your orders."

Gazing out into the canon with dilated eyes, Ruth sees him nimbly
clamber up the opposite side towards the point where Walsh is kneeling
behind a rock,--Walsh with his Irish mug expanded in a grin of
delight, the smoke just drifting from the muzzle of his carbine as he
points with his left hand somewhere out along the cliffs. She sees her
soldier boy, crouching low, draw himself to Walsh's side, sees him
glancing eagerly over the rocks, then signalling to some one on their
own side, pointing here and there along the wooded slope beyond her
vision; sees him now, with fierce light in his eyes, suddenly clutch
Walsh's sleeve and nod towards some invisible object to the south;
sees Walsh toss the butt of his carbine to the shoulder and with quick
aim send a bullet driving thither; sees Drummond take the field-glass
and, resting it on the eastward ledge, gaze long and fixedly out over
the eastward way; sees him start, draw back the glass, wipe the lenses
with his silken kerchief, then peer again; sees him drop them with a
gesture almost tragic, but she cannot hear the moan that rises to his
lips.

"My God! those are Apaches, too."

XI.

Ten o'clock on a blazing Arizona morning. The hot sun is pouring down
upon the jagged front of a range of heights where occasional clumps of
pine and cedar, scrub oak and juniper, seemed the only vegetable
products hardy enough to withstand the alternations of intense heat by
day and moderate cold by night, or to find sufficient sustenance to
eke out a living on so barren a soil. Out to the eastward, stretching
away to an opposite range, lies a sandy desert dotted at wide
intervals with little black bunches of "scrub mezquite" and blessed
with only one redeeming patch of foliage, the copse of willows and
cottonwood here at the mouth of a rock-ribbed defile where a little
brook, rising heaven knows how or where among the heights to the west,
comes frothing and tumbling down through the windings of the gorge
only to bury itself in the burning sands beyond the shade. So narrow
and tortuous is the canon, so precipitous its sides, as to prove
conclusiv