Of course she did not always believe that he could be dead, and in her hours of hope she wrote letters inquiring about his fate.  In other days he had told her much of himself, stories of his childhood and his battles, the number of his old regiment and his new one, titles of his superiors, names of comrades, etc.  To which among all these unknown ones should she address herself?  She fixed on the commander of his present regiment, and that awfully mysterious personage the Adjutant-General of the army, a title which seemed to represent omniscience and omnipotence.  To each of these gentlemen she sent an epistle recounting where, when, and how Lieutenant Ralph Thurstane had been ambushed by unknown Indians, supposed to be Apaches.

These letters she wrote and mailed without the knowledge of Coronado.  This was not caution, but pity; she did not suspect that he would try to intercept them; only that it would pain him to learn how much she yet thought of his rival.  Indeed, it would have been cruel to show them to him, for he would have seen that they were blurred with tears.  You perceive that she had come to be tender of the feelings of this earnest and scoundrelly lover, believing in his sincerity and not in his villainy.

“Surely some of those people will know,” thought Clara, with a trust in men and dignitaries which makes one say sancta simplicitas.  “If they do not know,” she added, with a prayer in her heart, “God will discover it to them.”

But no answers came for months.  The colonel was not with his regiment, but on detached service at New York, whither Clara’s letter travelled to find him, being addressed to his name and not marked “Official business.”  What he did of course was to forward it to the Adjutant-General of the army at Washington.  The Adjutant-General successively filed both communications, and sent a copy of each to headquarters at Santa Fe and San Francisco, with an endorsement advising inquiries and suitable search.  The mails were slow and circuitous, and the official routine was also slow and circuitous, so that it was long before headquarters got the papers and went to work.

Does any one marvel that Clara did not go directly to the military authorities in the city?  It must be remembered that man has his own world, as woman has hers, and that each sex is very ignorant of the spheres and missions of the other, the retired sex being especially limited in its information.  The girl had never been told that there was such a thing as district headquarters, or that soldiers in San Francisco had anything to do with soldiers at Fort Yuma.  Nor was she in the way of learning such facts, being miles away from a uniform, and even from an American.

One day, when she was fuller of hope than usual, she dared to write to that ghost, Thurstane.  Where should the letter be addressed?  It cost her much reflection to decide that it ought to go to the station of his company, Fort Yuma.  This gave her an idea, and she at once penned two other letters, one directed “To the Captain of Company I,” and one to Sergeant Meyer.  But unfortunately those three epistles were not sent off before it occurred to Coronado that he ought to overlook the packages that were sent from the hacienda to the city.  By the way, he had from the first assumed a secret censorship over the mails which arrived.