Having ordered the ambulance up the gorge, he himself spurred away to gather in all stragglers within reach, so as to reinforce the little garrison at the caves in the event of attack from the Apaches.  To his practised eye no vestige of doubt remained as to the character and purpose of the signal-smokes.  Not a moment was to be lost.  Within that very hour, perhaps, unseen Indians would come skulking, spying, “snaking” upon their refuge, would be able, infallibly, to determine the number and character of its occupants, and, if their own force were considerable and that of the garrison weak, God alone could help those innocent women.

When last noted the westward signal was puffing slowly up into the cloudless sky from a point in the range perhaps six miles below Patterson’s station in the rocks.  The three wearied troopers dragging slowly back from the chase could be seen coming up the valley probably four miles away, some distance, therefore, ahead of the supposed position of the foe.  Wing well knew with what goat-like agility the mountain Indians could speed along from rock to rock and still keep under cover, and every man who had served a month in Arizona could have predicted that if Indians in any force were within a day’s march of those three stragglers ambush and death would be their fate, perhaps even when within view of their longed-for goal.  That they had not seen the sign, that they were ignorant of the possible presence of Apaches in the range, was manifest simply because they rode close along under the foot-hills, often over the bowlder-strown outskirt of the falda, and, though still far from them, such was Wing’s anxiety for their safety that he rode furiously along, signalling with his left hand as though to say “Keep out!  Keep to your right!  Don’t go so close to the rocks!”

In this way, urging Dick to his speed and never thinking of his own safety, intent only on saving his comrades from possible death, believing, too, that no Apache could yet have worked his way so far up the range, Wing was riding, straight as the crow flies, from the little oasis at the mouth of the canon towards the ambling laggards to the south.  His course led him along within a hundred yards of many a bowlder or “suwarrow,” though his path itself was unobstructed.  The sun had gone westering and he was in the shadow.  Presently, however, as Dick panted painfully, heavily, up a very gentle slope and the sergeant came upon the low crest of a mound-like upheaval, he saw some four hundred yards ahead a broad bay of sunlight stretching in from the glaring sea to the east, and, glancing to his right, noted that there was a depression in the range,—­something like a broad cleft in the mountains, possibly a pass through to the broader desert on the other side.  He gave it little thought, however.  There, only a mile or so away now, came his fellow-troopers, two in front, another lagging some distance behind, riding sleepily towards him and dangerously close to a number