“You go, Quinn, but get some one else to help you.  Patterson, your horse is fresh, gallop back on the trail.  Tell Sergeant Meinecke to come ahead for all he’s worth.  Let the packs take care of themselves.  Send Sergeant Lee in here to me again.”  Then with trembling hands the young officer turned his attention to his other patients.  Severing the cords with his hunting-knife, he freed them from their bonds, then dashed water over their scorched and blackened faces, meantime keeping up a running fire of questions.  Between his sobs, the young civilian told him that the outlaws had hitched in both teams and taken also the spare mules and the buck-board.  They had lifted the Harvey girls into the Concord, the safe and Pasqual Morales into the paymaster’s ambulance, while the wounded men and Moreno’s people probably were put on the open wagon.  Then they had all driven furiously away to the south, leaving only two or three men to complete the work at the ranch.  Finding the paymaster and sergeant well-nigh dead, they had contented themselves with binding and leaving them to their fate, to be cremated when the roof of the shed came down.  Then one of the gang whom he had once befriended in Tucson pleaded with his fellows to spare the life of the only one of the party left to tell the tale.  Pasqual and the Mexicans were gone.  Those who remained were Americans, judging by their speech, though two of them were still masked.  “My name is Woods,” said the poor fellow.  “But that bandit had to beg hard.  They were ready to murder anybody connected with the defence, for Ramon was killed and Pasqual shot through the leg.  I did that, though they didn’t know it.  They bound and left me here, but made me swear I would tell Harvey and his friends when they got back that it was no use following; they had thirty armed men and three hours’ start.  They never thought of any one else getting here first.  Oh, my God! who can break it to Mr. Harvey when he does come?”

And then Sergeant Lee came hurrying back, one or two men with him, and together they labored to restore to consciousness the paymaster, breathing feebly, and old Feeny, bleeding from a gash in the back of the skull and a bullet-hole through the body.  For nearly quarter of an hour their efforts were vain.  Meantime Drummond, well-nigh mad over the delay, was pacing about like a caged tiger.  He set two of the men to work to hitch the bewildered little burros to the well-wheel and get up several huge bucketfuls of water against the coming of the troop.  He ordered others to rub down his handsome sorrel, Chester, and the mounts of two of the advanced party.  At last after what must have seemed an age, yet could not have been over thirty minutes from the time of their arrival, a soldier running in, said he could hear hoofs out on the plain, and at the same instant two men appeared lugging between them, bleeding and senseless, the ragged form of Edward Harvey.