ligently as any veteran in the regiment.

Having ordered the ambulance up the gorge, he himself spurred away to
gather in all stragglers within reach, so as to reinforce the little
garrison at the caves in the event of attack from the Apaches. To his
practised eye no vestige of doubt remained as to the character and
purpose of the signal-smokes. Not a moment was to be lost. Within that
very hour, perhaps, unseen Indians would come skulking, spying,
"snaking" upon their refuge, would be able, infallibly, to determine
the number and character of its occupants, and, if their own force
were considerable and that of the garrison weak, God alone could help
those innocent women.

When last noted the westward signal was puffing slowly up into the
cloudless sky from a point in the range perhaps six miles below
Patterson's station in the rocks. The three wearied troopers dragging
slowly back from the chase could be seen coming up the valley probably
four miles away, some distance, therefore, ahead of the supposed
position of the foe. Wing well knew with what goat-like agility the
mountain Indians could speed along from rock to rock and still keep
under cover, and every man who had served a month in Arizona could
have predicted that if Indians in any force were within a day's march
of those three stragglers ambush and death would be their fate,
perhaps even when within view of their longed-for goal. That they had
not seen the sign, that they were ignorant of the possible presence of
Apaches in the range, was manifest simply because they rode close
along under the foot-hills, often over the bowlder-strown outskirt of
the _falda_, and, though still far from them, such was Wing's anxiety
for their safety that he rode furiously along, signalling with his
left hand as though to say "Keep out! Keep to your right! Don't go so
close to the rocks!"

In this way, urging Dick to his speed and never thinking of his own
safety, intent only on saving his comrades from possible death,
believing, too, that no Apache could yet have worked his way so far up
the range, Wing was riding, straight as the crow flies, from the
little oasis at the mouth of the canon towards the ambling laggards to
the south. His course led him along within a hundred yards of many a
bowlder or "_suwarrow_," though his path itself was unobstructed. The
sun had gone westering and he was in the shadow. Presently, however,
as Dick panted painfully, heavily, up a very gentle