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Title: A Wounded Name

Author: Charles King

Release Date: May 7, 2007 [EBook #21345]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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A
WOUNDED
NAME

BY

CAPTAIN
CHARLES KING
U.S.A.

[Illustration: CAPT. CHARLES KING]

AUTHOR OF

"Warrior Gap," "An Army Wife," "Fort Frayne," "A Garrison Tangle,"
"Noble Blood and a West Point Parallel,"
"Trumpeter Fred," etc.

"Poor wounded name! My bosom as a bed
Shall lodge thee, till thy wound be throughly healed."

--_Two Gentlemen of Verona_

F. TENNYSON NEELY,
PUBLISHER,
LONDON. NEW YORK.

Copyrighted, 1898.

by

F. TENNYSON NEELY

In the United States and Great Britain

(All rights reserved)

* * * * *

A WOUNDED NAME.

CHAPTER I.

The stage coach was invisible in a cloud of its own dust as it lurched
and rolled along the alkali flats down the valley, and Sancho, the
ranch-keeper, could not make out whether any passengers were on top or
not. He had brought a fine binocular to bear just as soon as the shrill
voice of Pedro, a swarthy little scamp of a half-breed, announced the
dust-cloud sailing over the clump of willows below the bend. Pedro was
not the youngster's original name, and so far as could be determined by
ecclesiastical records, owing to the omission of the customary church
ceremonies, he bore none that the chaplain at old Camp Cooke would admit
to be Christian. Itinerant prospectors and occasional soldiers, however,
had suggested a change from the original, or aboriginal, title which
was heathenish in the last degree, to the much briefer one of Pedro, as
fitting accompaniment to that of the illustrious head of the
establishment, and Lieutenant Blake, an infantry sub with cavalry
aspirations which had led him to seek arduous duties in this arid land,
had comprehensively damned the pretensions of the place to being a
"dinn