little, however.  The fact that after hours of repulse in open attack, the foe had all on a sudden carried their castle by a damnable ruse was only too forcibly apparent.  Writhing, struggling in miserable effort to free himself from his bonds, poor Harvey’s burning eyes were maddened by the picture before him only a couple of hundred yards away.  There in the fierce light of the flames now bursting from every window and roaring and shooting high in air from the brush-heaped roof of Moreno’s ranch,—­there stood the Concord wagon, stalwart men clinging to the heads of the plunging and excited mules, a big ruffian already in the driver’s seat, whip and reins in hand; there beside it was the paymaster’s ambulance, into which three of the gang were just shoving the green-painted iron safe,—­the Pandora’s box that had caused all their sorrows; there Moreno’s California buck-board, pressed into service and being used to carry the wounded, drawn by the extra mules; and then—­God of heaven! what a sight for brother’s eyes to see and make no sign!—­then one big brute lifted from the ground and handed up to a fellow already ensconced within the covered wagon the senseless, perhaps lifeless, form of pretty little Ruth, his father’s idol.  The poor child lay unresisting in the ruffian’s arms, but not so Paquita.  It took two men, strong and burly, to lift and force her into the dark interior, and one of those, to the uttermost detail of his equipment, was to all appearance a trooper of the United States cavalry.  There stood his panting horse with hanging head and jaded withers, the very steed whose rush they had welcomed with such exceeding joy, saddled, bridled, blanketed, saddle-bagged, lariated, side-lined, every item complete and exactly as issued by the Ordnance Department.  The trooper himself wore the field uniform of the cavalry,—­the dark-blue blouse, crossed by the black carbine sling, whose big brass buckle Ned could even now see gleaming between the broad shoulders, and gathered at the waist by the old-fashioned “thimble belt” the troop saddlers used to make for field service before the woven girdle was devised.  Even more:  Harvey in his misery remembered the thrill of joy with which he had noted, as the splendid rider reined in and threw himself from the saddle, the crossed sabres, the troop letter “C,” and the regimental number gleaming at the front of his campaign hat.  Who—­who could this be, wearing the honorable garb of a soldier of United States, yet figuring as a ringleader in a band of robbers and assassins now adding rapine to their calendar of crime?  Edward Harvey’s heart almost burst with helpless rage and wretchedness when he saw his precious sisters dragged within the canvas shelter,—­saw the tall, uniformed brigand leap lightly after them, and heard him shout to the ready driver, “Now, off with you!”

Crack! went the whip as the men sprang from the heads of the frantic mules, and with a bound that nearly wrenched the trace-hooks from the stout whippletree, the Concord went spinning over the sands to the south, whirling so near him that over the thud of hoofs and whirl of wheels and creak of spring and wood-work he could hear poor Fanny’s despairing cry,—­the last sound he was aware of for hours, for now in dead earnest Harvey swooned away.