nd his party were gone. The beacon still
blazed at the westward pass. The twang of the guitar had ceased.
Silence reigned about the ranch. Old Plummer with anxious face plodded
slowly up and down the open space in front of the deserted bar. Feeny,
with three loaded carbines close at hand and his belt bristling with
revolvers, was dividing his attention between the safe and the still
sleeping troopers. Every once in a while he would station the major at
the safe, which had been hauled into the easternmost of the rooms that
opened to the front instead of on the corral, and, revolver in hand,
would patrol the premises, never failing to stop at a certain window
behind which he believed Moreno to be lurking, to warn that impulsive
Greaser not to show his head outside his room if he didn't want it
blown off his shoulders; never failing on his return to stir up both
recumbent forms with angry foot, and then to shower in equal portions
cold water and hot imprecations upon them. To Pedro he had intrusted
the duty of caring for the horses of his prostrate comrades. Every
faculty he possessed was on the alert, watching for the faintest sign
of treachery or hostility from within, listening with dread but stern
determination for the first sound of hoof-beats from without. It must
have been about ten o'clock when, leaving Mr. Dawes, the clerk, seated
in the dark interior beside the safe, Feeny stepped forth to make
another round, stopped to look at Mullan and his partner, now
beginning to twitch uneasily and moan and toss in their drunken sleep,
and then turned to seek the paymaster. Whatsoever lights Moreno had
been accustomed to burn by way of lure or encouragement to belated
travellers, all was gloom to-night. The bar was silence and darkness.
The bare east room adjoining the corral was tenanted now only by the
clerk and the precious iron box of "greenbacks." No glimmer of lamp
showed there. The westward apartments, opening only one into another
and thence into the corral, were still as the night, and even when a
shutter was slowly pushed from within, as though the occupants craved
more air, no gleam of light came through.

"Don't show your ugly mug out here, Moreno," cautioned Feeny for the
fourth or fifth time, "and warn any damned cut-throat with you to keep
in hiding. The man who attempts to come out gets a bullet through
him."

There had been shrill protestation in Mexican Spanish and Senora
Moreno's strident tones when fir