d from his fingers and fell noiselessly in the trail.
With an exclamation he dropped to the road and to his knees, and groping
in the dust began an eager search.

The sergeant caught at the rifle of the sharpshooter, and pressed it
down.

"Look!" he whispered. "He IS a scout. He is searching the trail for the
tracks of our ponies. If you fire they will hear it a league away."

"But if he finds our trail and returns--"

The sergeant shook his head. "I let him pass forward," he said grimly.
"He will never return."

Chesterton pounced upon the half-buried matchbox, and in a panic lest he
might again lose it, thrust it inside his tunic.

"Little do you know, El Capitan," he exclaimed breathlessly, as he
scrambled back into the saddle and lifted the pony into a gallop, "what
a narrow escape I had. I almost lost it."

Toward midnight they came to a wooden bridge swinging above a ravine
in which a mountain stream, forty feet below, splashed over half-hidden
rocks, and the stepping stones of the ford. Even before the campaign
began the bridge had outlived its usefulness, and the unwonted burden of
artillery, and the vibrations of marching men had so shaken it that it
swayed like a house of cards. Threatened by its own weight, at the mercy
of the first tropic storm, it hung a death trap for the one who first
added to its burden.

No sooner had El Capitan struck it squarely with his four hoofs, than he
reared and, whirling, sprang back to the solid earth. The suddenness of
his retreat had all but thrown Chesterton, but he regained his seat, and
digging the pony roughly with his spurs, pulled his head again toward
the bridge.

"What are you shying at, now?" he panted. "That's a perfectly good
bridge."

For a minute horse and man struggled for the mastery, the horse spinning
in short circles, the man pulling, tugging, urging him with knees and
spurs. The first round ended in a draw. There were two more rounds with
the advantage slightly in favor of El Capitan, for he did not approach
the bridge.

The night was warm and the exertion violent. Chesterton, puzzled and
annoyed, paused to regain his breath and his temper. Below him, in
the ravine, the shallow waters of the ford called to him, suggesting a
pleasant compromise. He turned his eyes downward and saw hanging over
the water what appeared to be a white bird upon the lower limb of a
dead tree. He knew it to be an orchid, an especially rare orchid, and he
knew, also