sleep, and then turned to seek the paymaster.  Whatsoever lights Moreno had been accustomed to burn by way of lure or encouragement to belated travellers, all was gloom to-night.  The bar was silence and darkness.  The bare east room adjoining the corral was tenanted now only by the clerk and the precious iron box of “greenbacks.”  No glimmer of lamp showed there.  The westward apartments, opening only one into another and thence into the corral, were still as the night, and even when a shutter was slowly pushed from within, as though the occupants craved more air, no gleam of light came through.

“Don’t show your ugly mug out here, Moreno,” cautioned Feeny for the fourth or fifth time, “and warn any damned cut-throat with you to keep in hiding.  The man who attempts to come out gets a bullet through him.”

There had been shrill protestation in Mexican Spanish and Senora Moreno’s strident tones when first he conveyed his orders to the master of the ranch, but Moreno himself had made no audible reply, and, as was conjectured, had enjoined silence on his wife, for after that outbreak she spoke no more.

“I’ve got this approach covered anyhow,” muttered the veteran.  “Now if I only had men to watch those doors into the corral, I could pen Moreno and whatever he has here at his back.  It’s that gang of hell-hounds we passed at Ceralvo’s that will pay us a call before morning, or I’m a duffer.”

Once again he found the paymaster wearily, anxiously patrolling his self-assumed post out beyond the westward wall.  The presence of common danger, the staff official’s forgetfulness of self and his funds in his determination to aid the wretched women whom he firmly believed to have been run off by the Apaches, had won from the sergeant the tribute of more respectful demeanor, even though he held the story of the raid to be an out-and-out lie.

“Any signs or sounds yet, sir?” he questioned in muffled tone.

“Why, I thought—­just a moment ago—­I heard something like the crack of a whip far out there on the plain.”

“That’s mighty strange, sir; no stage is due coming east until to-morrow night, and no stage would dare pull out on this stretch in face of the warning there at Picacho.”

“Well, it may have been imagination.  My nerves are all unused to this sort of thing.  How do you work this affair when you want to reload, sergeant?  I’m blessed if I understand it.  I never carried a revolver before in my life.”

Feeny took the glistening, nickel-plated Smith & Wessen, clicked the hammer to the safety-notch, tested the cylinder springs, and, touching the lever, showed his superior by the feel rather than sight how the perfect mechanism was made to turn on its hinge and thrust the emptied shells from their chamber.

“The Lord grant we may have no call to shoot to-night, sir, but I misdoubt the whole situation.  That fire’s beginning to wear itself out already, and any minute I look to hear the hoof-beats of the Morales gang, surrounding us here on every side.  If they’ll only hold off till towards morning and I can brace up these two poor devils they’ve poisoned, we can stand ’em off a while until our fellows begin to come back or Lieutenant Drummond hears of the gathering.”