voided sight of, or speech with, her soldier who could do no
wrong. And if Mrs. Archer believed in 'Tonio, on her husband's account,
what must have been Lilian's conviction? she who had both father and
lover--father and the husband soon to be, for of that Mrs. Archer had
now no earthly doubt--the two men beyond all others combined who were
dearest to Lilian on earth, both of them inimical to 'Tonio, one of
them wellnigh his victim. It was Mrs. Stannard who listened in silence.
She had longer known the Apache-Mohave, and as between 'Tonio and
Willett it might well be a story with two sides.

They had finished their coffee and were just coming forth upon the
veranda into the exquisite evening air, and, as bidden by her father,
Lilian had just begun to tune her guitar, when across the parade among
the men seated along the low front of the barracks there was sudden
start, sudden rush, and, from up the line of officers' quarters not
many doors away, came agonized cry for help. Archer sprang to his feet
and started, but Mrs. Archer, in a paroxysm of fear, thinking only of
Indians and treachery, seized him by the arm, clung to and held him.
Mrs. Stannard sprang within the hall and back with Archer's revolver
which, without a word, she thrust into his hand. Then all three
together started, for while fifty men came tearing headlong across the
sandy level, making straight for the adjutant's quarters, Lilian, their
little Lilian--the silent, sad-eyed, anxious child of the days and days
gone by--heading everybody, was flying like a white-winged bird,
straight along the line, and when the father reached her she had thrown
herself upon a heap of burning, smouldering bedding, thrashing it with
a wet blanket snatched from the olla, and then, with her own fair,
white hands, was beating out the few sparks that remained about the
sleeve and shoulder of a soaked and dishevelled gown, and brushing
others from the hair and face of an unheroic, swathed and dripping
figure--Harold Willett in the midst of the wreck of his cot, while
Blitz, the striker, aided by Wettstein and the doctor's man, were
stamping and swearing and tearing things to bits in the effort to down
other incipient blazes. Between them they had dragged Willett from the
midst of the flames and drenched him with a cataract from the olla. The
rush of the men from the barracks made short work of the fire, but when
Mrs. Archer and Mrs. Stannard, with throbbing hearts, bent over the