Wearied and shattered though he was and replete as the night had been with anxiety and vigil, Drummond climbed the goat-track that led to the sentry’s perch feeling full of hope and pluck and fight.  He and his men had divided the night into watches, one being awake and astir, not even permitting himself to sit a moment, while the others slept.  The fact that he was able to send back to the caves, have an ambulance hitched in and driven down to where Wing lay wounded, and to bear him slowly, carefully, back to shelter, reaching the caves without further molestation before darkness set in, had served to convince the young commander that he could count on reasonable security for the night.  Unless they know their prey to be puny and well-nigh defenceless, Apaches make no assault in the darkness, and so, with the coming of the dawn, he had about him fit for service a squad of seven troopers, most of them seasoned mountain fighters.  His main anxiety now was for Wing, whose wound was severe, the bullet having gone clear through, just grazing the bone, and who, despite the fact that Fanny Harvey early in the night had every now and then crept noiselessly in to cool his fevered head, seemed strangely affected mentally, seemed unnaturally flighty and wandering, seemed oppressed or excited alternately in a way that baffled Drummond completely, for no explanation was plausible.  Two or three times during the night he had been heard moaning, and yet the moment Drummond or, as once happened, Miss Harvey hastened to his side, he declared it was nothing.  “I must have been dozing and imagined the pain was greater than it was.”  Awake and conscious, so stout a soldier as he would be the last to give way to childish exhibition of suffering, yet twice Drummond knew him to be awake despite his protestation of dozing, and he did not at all like it that Wing should bury his face in his arms, hiding it from all.  What could have occurred to change this buoyant, joyous, high-spirited trooper all on a sudden into a sighing, moaning, womanish fellow?  Surely not a wound of which, however painful, any soldier might be proud.

Somewhere along towards four o’clock, when it was again Patterson’s watch and Drummond arose from his blanket after a refreshing sleep of nearly two hours and he and his faithful sentry were standing just outside the mouth of the cave, they distinctly heard the same moan of distress.

“Is there nothing we can do to ease the sergeant, sir?” whispered Patterson.  “This makes the second time I have heard him groaning, and it’s so unlike him.”

“We have no opiates, and I doubt if he would use one if we had.  He declares there is no intense pain.”

“Well, first off, sir, I thought he was dreaming, but he was wide awake, and Miss Harvey came in only a moment after I got to him.  Could those devils poison a bullet as they do their arrows, and could that make him go into fever so soon?”

“I hardly think so; but why did you say dreaming?”