left behind; he was
directed to send a small party to see if there were an easier way up the
hill-side farther to the west, but to keep the main body there in
readiness to move whichever way they might be required. Then, with
Sergeant O'Grady and the reluctant Indians, Mr. Billings pushed up to
the left front, and was soon out of sight of his command. For fifteen
minutes he drove his scouts, dispersed in skirmish order, ahead of him,
but incessantly they sneaked behind rocks and trees out of his sight;
twice he caught them trying to drop back, and at last, losing all
patience, he sprang forward, saying, "Then _come_ on, you whelps, if you
cannot lead," and he and the sergeant hurried ahead. Then the Yumas
huddled together again and slowly followed.

Fifteen minutes more, and Mr. Billings found himself standing on the
edge of a broad shelf of the mountain,--a shelf covered with huge
boulders of rock tumbled there by storm and tempest, riven by
lightning-stroke or the slow disintegration of nature from the bare,
glaring, precipitous ledge he had marked from below. East and west it
seemed to stretch, forbidding and inaccessible. Turning to the sergeant,
Mr. Billings directed him to make his way off to the right and see if
there were any possibility of finding a path to the summit; then looking
back down the side, and marking his Indians cowering under the trees
some fifty yards away, he signalled "come up," and was about moving
farther to his left to explore the shelf, when something went whizzing
past his head, and, embedding itself in a stunted oak behind him, shook
and quivered with the shock,--a Tonto arrow. Only an instant did he see
it, photographed as by electricity upon the retina, when with a sharp
stinging pang and whirring "whist" and thud a second arrow, better
aimed, tore through the flesh and muscles just at the outer corner of
his left eye, and glanced away down the hill. With one spring he gained
the edge of the shelf, and shouted to the scouts to come on. Even as he
did so, bang! bang! went the reports of two rifles among the rocks, and,
as with one accord, the Apache Yumas turned tail and rushed back down
the hill, leaving him alone in the midst of hidden foes. Stung by the
arrow, bleeding, but not seriously hurt, he crouched behind a rock, with
carbine at ready, eagerly looking for the first sign of an enemy. The
whiz of another arrow from the left drew his eyes thither, and quick as
a flash his weapon