Out dashed the savages, gorgeous in their feathered war-bonnets, but
looking like fiends with their paint-bedaubed faces. Stopping the
frightened mules, they pulled open the doors of the coach and,
mercilessly dragging its helpless and surprised inmates to the ground,
immediately began their butchery. They scalped and mutilated the dead
bodies of their victims in their usual sickening manner, not a single
individual escaping, apparently, to tell of their fiendish acts.

If the Indians had been possessed of sufficient cunning to cover up the
tracks of their horrible atrocities, as probably white robbers would
have done, by dragging the coach from the road and destroying it by fire
or other means, the story of the murders committed in the deep canyon
might never have been known; but they left the tell-tale remains of
the dismantled vehicle just where they had attacked it, and the naked
corpses of its passengers where they had been ruthlessly killed.

At the next stage station the employees were anxiously waiting for the
arrival of the coach, and wondering what could have caused the delay;
for it was due there at noon on the day of the massacre. Hour after hour
passed, and at last they began to suspect that something serious had
occurred; they sat up all through the night listening for the familiar
rumbling of wheels, but still no stage. At daylight next morning,
determined to wait no longer, as they felt satisfied that something out
of the usual course had happened, a party hurriedly mounted their horses
and rode down the broad trail leading to the canyon.

Upon entering its gloomy mouth after a quick lope of an hour, they
discovered the ghastly remains of twelve mutilated bodies. These were
gathered up and buried in one grave, on the top of the bluff overlooking
the narrow gorge.

They could not be sure of the number of passengers the coach had brought
until the arrival of the next, as it would have a list of those carried
by its predecessor; but it would not be due for several days. They
naturally supposed, however, that the twelve dead lying on the ground
were its full complement.

Not waiting for the arrival of the next stage, they despatched a
messenger to the last station east that the one whose occupants had been
murdered had passed, and there learned the exact number of passengers
it had contained. Now they knew that Mrs. White, her child, and the
coloured nurse had been carried off into a captivity worse tha