refusing to yield to furious battering. It was locked, bolted,
or barred from the other side. Blindly he turned and rushed for the
side porch and the open air, stumbling against the striker as the
latter came clattering headlong down from aloft. Then together they
rushed to the parlor window, now cracking and splitting from the
furious heat within. A volume of black fume came belching forth,
driven and lashed by ruddy tongues of flame within, and their shouts
for aid went up on the wings of the dawn, and the infantry sentry on
the eastward post came running to see; caught one glimpse of the glare
at that southward window; bang went his rifle with a ring that came
echoing back from the opposite cliffs, as all Camp Sandy sprang from
its bed in answer to the stentorian shout "Fire! No. 5!"

CHAPTER XIII

WHOSE LETTERS?

There is something about a night alarm of fire at a military post that
borders on the thrilling. In the days whereof we write the buildings
were not the substantial creations of brick and stone to be seen
to-day, and those of the scattered "camps" and stations in that arid,
sun-scorched land of Arizona were tinder boxes of the flimsiest and
most inflammable kind.

It could hardly have been a minute from the warning shot and yell of
No. 5--repeated right and left by other sentries and echoed by No. 1
at the guard-house--before bugle and trumpet were blaring their fierce
alarm, and the hoarse roar of the drum was rousing the inmates of the
infantry barracks. Out they came, tumbling pell-mell into the
accustomed ranks, confronted by the sight of Blakely's quarters one
broad sheet of flame. With incredible speed the blaze had burst forth
from the front room on the lower floor; leaped from window to window,
from ledge to ledge; fastened instantly on overhanging roof, and the
shingled screen of the veranda; had darted up the dry wooden stairway,
devouring banister, railing, and snapping pine floor, and then,
billowing forth from every crack, crevice, and casement of the upper
floor streamed hissing and crackling on the blackness that precedes
the dawn, a magnificent glare that put to shame the feeble signal
fires lately gleaming in the mountains. Luckily there was no
wind--there never was a wind at Sandy--and the flames leaped straight
for the zenith, lashing their way into the huge black pillar of smoke
cloud sailing aloft to the stars.

Under their sergeants, running in disciplined order, one comp