irst
enlistment.

"Private Goss, here, has a queer story to tell, sir."

"What do you know? What have you seen?" asked Drummond.

"Why, sir, right after Sergeant Lee caught sight of the fire and sung
out that it was Moreno's I was back about a couple of rods looking for
my canteen. I was that startled when they found Corporal Donovan dead
that I dropped it, and all of a sudden somebody comes out past me
leading his horse, and I asked him what he had lost, and he said his
pipe, and passed me by, and I thought nothing more about it,--only no
sooner did he get out into the dark where I couldn't see him than I
heard all of a sudden a horse start at full gallop right over in this
direction, and now I think of it it must have been Bland, for it was
him that passed me, sir,--sneaking out like."

Drummond sprang to his feet.

"What say you to this, sergeant? Do you believe,--do you think it
possible that Bland has deserted and joined these outlaws?"

"I don't know what to think, sir, but I haven't forgotten what Feeny
said of him."

"What was that?"

"That he had too smooth a tongue to have led a rough and honest life;
that if he was a Texan as he claimed, Texas people had learned to talk
a different lingo since he was stationed among them with the old
Second Cavalry before the war, and that he wished he'd been there at
Lowell when the adjutant accepted those letters from former officers
of the regiment as genuine. Bland would never show them to Feeny. Said
he had sent 'em all to his home in Texas. That was what made bad blood
between them."

"By heaven! and now to think that one of our troop--'C' troop--should
have been engaged in this outrage! But we'll get them, men," said
Drummond, straightening up to his full height and raising his
gauntleted hand in air. "They can't go fast or far with those wagons
such a night as this. They'll strike the foot-hills before they've
gone ten miles, then they'll have to go slow. We'll catch them before
the sun is up, and, by the God of heaven, if Bland is with them, I'll
string him to the highest tree we can find."

"There's more than him that'll be strung up," growled a grizzled old
trooper in an undertone. "The gang that murdered Pat Donovan will find
scant mercy in this crowd."

"Ay, ay," said another, "and there's more than Pat Donovan to be
scored off. Look yonder." For at the instant one of the packers came
leading into the corral a resisting mule, at sight of whose burd