“Hush, caballero; they come not to-night.  You will rest here.”

“Why, how in blazes do you know?”

“Softly!—­I know not.  I know noting; yet, mira!—­I know.  They talk long in the corral,—­the major and that pig of a sergeant;—­for him I snap my finger.  Look you!” And Moreno gave a flip indicative of combined defiance and disdain.

“Don’t you count on his not finding out, Moreno.  It’s all easy enough so far as the major’s concerned, but that blackguard Feeny’s different, I tell you.  He’d hear the gurgle of the spigot if he were ten miles across the Gila, and be here to bust things before you could serve out a gill,—­damn him!  He’s been keen enough to put that psalm-singing Yankee on guard over your liquor.  How’re you going to get at it, anyhow?”

For all answer the Mexican placed the forefinger of his left hand upon his lips and with that of the right hand pointed significantly to the hard-beaten earthen floor.

“Ah—­I have a mine,” he whispered.  “You will not betray, eh?  Shu-u!  Hush!  He comes now.”

The gruff voice of Sergeant Feeny broke up the colloquy.

“Corporal Murphy, take what men you have here and groom at once.  Feed and water too.—­Moreno, I want supper cooked for eight in thirty minutes.—­Drop those cards now, you men; you should have been sleeping as I told you, so as to be ready for work to-night.”

“Shure we don’t go to-night, sergeant?”

“Who says that?” demanded Feeny, quickly, whirling upon his subordinates.  The corporal looked embarrassed and turned to Moreno for support.  Moreno, profoundly calm, was as profoundly oblivious.

“Moreno there,” began Murphy, finding himself compelled to speak.

“I?” gravely, courteously protested the Mexican, with deprecatory shrug of his shoulders and upward lift of eyebrow.  “I?  What know I?  I do but say the Corporal Donovan is not come.  How know I you go not out to-night?”

“Neither you nor the likes of you knows,” was Feeny’s stern retort.  “We go when we will and no questions asked.  As for you, Murphy, you be ready, and it’s me you’ll ask, not any outsider, when we go.  I’ve had enough to swear at to-day without you fellows playing off on me.  Go or no go—­no liquor, mind you.  The first man I catch drinking I’ll tie by the thumbs to the back of the ambulance, and he’ll foot it to Stoneman.”

No words were wasted in remonstrance or reply.  These were indeed “the days of the empire” in Arizona,—­days soon after the great war of the rebellion, when men drank and swore and fought and gambled in the rough life of their exile, but obeyed, and obeyed without question, the officers appointed over them.  These were the days when veteran sergeants like Feeny—­men who had served under St. George Cooke and Sumner and Harney on the wide frontier before the war, who had ridden with the starry guidons in many a wild, whirling charge under Sheridan and Merritt and Custer in the valley