tain through the heart.

The lieutenant started to turn toward his troopers. But he never had a
chance to give his order. The whole blue-clad band was charging on a
dead run. What followed did not take long. There was not a single
prisoner brought back to the reservation.

When men are warring in that relentless spirit, no one who is blessed
with the ordinary amount of reasoning power looks for mercy even if it
be promised. And Uncle Billy Rhodes did well to run his bluff down
there in the willows by the river.

Sometimes, however, the Apaches felt themselves forced to show respect
for their dead enemies. There was, for instance, the short-card man
from Prescott. Felix was his name; the surname may be chronicled
somewhere for all the writer knows; it ought to be. A short-card
gambler, and that was not all; men say that he had sold whisky to the
Indians, that he was in partnership with a band of stock-rustlers, and
that on occasion he had been known to turn his hand to robbery by
violence. In fact there is no good word spoken of his life up to the
time when the very end came.

In Prescott he owned none of that friendship which a man craves from
his fellows; respect was never bestowed upon him. He walked the
streets of that frontier town a moral pariah.

Those who associated with him--those who made their living by dubious
means--looked up to him with an esteem born only of hard-eyed envy for
his prosperity. For he was doing well, as the saying goes; making good
money.

Felix had managed to find a wife, a half-breed Mexican woman; and she
had borne him children, two or three of them. He had a ranch some
distance from the town, and many cattle.

And on the great day of his life, the day when he became glorious, he
was driving from the ranch to Prescott with his family: a two-horse
buckboard and Felix at the reins; the woman and the children bestowed
beside him and about him.

Somewhere along the road the Apaches "jumped" them, to use the idiom
of those times. A mounted band and on their way across-country, they
spied the buckboard and started after it. The road was rough; the
half-broken ponies weary; and the renegades gained at every jump.
Felix plied the whip and kept his broncos to the dead run until their
legs were growing heavy under them and the run slackened to a
lumbering gallop.

Prescott was only a few miles away. They reached a place where the
road ran between rocky banks, a place where there was no