SUIT OF THE APACHES

With twenty-eight men, including two scouts picked up as we passed
through Prescott, and the post surgeon, I left for Skull Valley. The
night was moonless, but the myriad stars shone brilliantly through the
rarefied atmosphere of that Western region, lighting the trail and
making it fairly easy to follow. It was a narrow pathway, with but few
places where two horsemen could ride abreast, so conversation was
almost impossible, and few words, except those of command, were
spoken; nor were the men in a mood to talk. All were more or less
excited and impatient, and, wherever the road would permit, urged
their horses to a run.

The trail climbed and descended rugged steeps, crossed smooth
intervals, skirted the edges of precipices, wound along borders of dry
creeks, and threaded forests of pine and clumps of sage-brush and
greasewood. Throughout the ride the imaginations of officers and men
were depicting the scenes they feared were being enacted in the
valley, or which might take place should they fail to arrive in time
to prevent.

It is needless to say, perhaps, that the one person about whom the
thoughts of the men composing the rescuing party centred was the
gentle, bright, and pretty Brenda. To think of her falling into the
hands of the merciless Apaches was almost maddening.

On and on rode the column, the men giving their panting steeds no more
rest than the nature of the road and the success of the expedition
required. At last we reached the spur of the range behind which lay
Skull Valley. We skirted it, and with anxious eyes sought through the
darkness the place where the ranch buildings should be. All was
silence. No report of fire-arms or whoop of savages disturbed the
quiet of the valley.

Ascending a swell in the surface of the ground we saw that all the
buildings had disappeared, nothing meeting our anxious gaze but beds
of lurid coals, occasionally fanned into a red glow by the
intermittent night breeze. But there was the impregnable earthwork;
the family must be in that. I dashed swiftly forward, eagerly followed
by my men. The earthwork was destroyed, nothing but a circular pit
remaining, in the bottom of which glowed the embers of the fallen
roof-timbers.

A search for the slain was at once begun, and continued for a long
time. Every square rod of the valley for a mile was hunted over
without result, and we all gathered once more about the two cellars,
in which the coals sti