ng about, sends shot after shot up the hill,
checking the pursuit and driving the cowardly footpads to cover. Once he
gives vent to a genuine Kilkenny "hurroo" as a tall Apache drops his
rifle and plunges head foremost among the rocks with his hands
convulsively clasped to his breast. Then the sergeant once more picks up
his wounded comrade, despite pleas, orders, or imprecations, and rushes
on.

"I cannot stand it, O'Grady. Go and save yourself. You _must_ do it. I
_order_ you to do it." Every instant the shots and arrows whiz closer,
but the sergeant never winces, and at last, panting, breathless, having
carried his chief full three hundred yards down the rugged slope, he
gives out entirely, but with a gasp of delight points down among the
trees:

"Here come the boys, sir."

Another moment, and the soldiers are rushing up the rocks beside them,
their carbines ringing like merry music through the frosty air, and the
Apaches are scattering in every direction.

"Old man, are you much hurt?" is the whispered inquiry his
brother-officer can barely gasp for want of breath, and, reassured by
the faint grin on Mr. Billings's face, and a barely audible "Arm
busted,--that's all; pitch in and use them up," he pushes on with his
men.

In ten minutes the affair is ended. The Indians have been swept away
like chaff; the field and the wounded they have abandoned are in the
hands of the troopers; the young commander's life is saved; and then,
and for long after, the hero of the day is Buxton's _bete noire_, "the
worst man in the troop."

VAN.

He was the evolution of a military horse-trade,--one of those periodical
swappings required of his dragoons by Uncle Sam on those rare occasions
when a regiment that has been dry-rotting half a decade in Arizona is at
last relieved by one from the Plains. How it happened that we of the
Fifth should have kept him from the clutches of those sharp
horse-fanciers of the Sixth is more than I know. Regimental tradition
had it that we got him from the Third Cavalry when it came our turn to
go into exile in 1871. He was the victim of some temporary malady at the
time,--one of those multitudinous ills to which horse-flesh is heir,--or
he never would have come to us. It was simply impossible that anybody
who knew anything about horses should trade off such a promising young
racer so long as there remained an unpledged pay-account in the
officers' mess. Possibly the arid climate of Arizo