and light no fires for a while, trusting that the pursuers would
pass his hiding place.

For a moment he thought of sending Texas Smith to ambush the party, and
shoot Thurstane if he should be in it, pleading afterwards that the men
looked, in the darkness, like Apaches. But no; this was an extreme
measure; he revolted against it a little. Moreover, there was danger of
retribution: settlements not so far off; soldiers still nearer.

So he lay quiet, chewing a bit of grass to allay his nervousness, and
talking stronger love to Clara than he had yet thought needful or wise.

CHAPTER VI.

Lieutenant Thurstane passed the mouth of the ravine in the dusk of
twilight, without guessing that it contained Clara Van Diemen and her
perils.

He had with him Sergeant Weber of his own company, just returned from
recruiting service at St. Louis, and three recruits for the company,
Kelly, Shubert, and Sweeny.

Weber, a sunburnt German, with sandy eyelashes, blue eyes, and a scar on
his cheek, had been a soldier from his eighteenth to his thirtieth year,
and wore the serious, patient, much-enduring air peculiar to veterans.
Kelly, an Irishman, also about thirty, slender in form and somewhat
haggard in face, with the same quiet, contained, seasoned look to him, the
same reminiscence of unavoidable sufferings silently borne, was also an
old infantry man, having served in both the British and American armies.
Shubert was an American lad, who had got tired of clerking it in an
apothecary's shop, and had enlisted from a desire for adventure, as you
might guess from his larkish countenance. Sweeny was a diminutive Paddy,
hardly regulation height for the army, as light and lively as a monkey,
and with much the air of one.

Thurstane had obtained orders from the post commandant to lead his party
by the northern route, on condition that he would investigate and report
as to its practicability for military and other transit. He had also been
allowed to draw by requisition fifty days' rations, a box of ammunition,
and four mules. Starting thirty-six hours after Coronado, he made in two
days and a half the distance which the train had accomplished in four. Now
he had overtaken his quarry, and in the obscurity had passed it.

But Sergeant Weber was an old hand on the Plains, and notwithstanding the
darkness and the generally stony nature of the ground, he presently
discovered that the fresh trail of the wagons was missing. Thurstane