“Every man to his post now.  Remember your orders.”

Gazing out into the canon with dilated eyes, Ruth sees him nimbly clamber up the opposite side towards the point where Walsh is kneeling behind a rock,—­Walsh with his Irish mug expanded in a grin of delight, the smoke just drifting from the muzzle of his carbine as he points with his left hand somewhere out along the cliffs.  She sees her soldier boy, crouching low, draw himself to Walsh’s side, sees him glancing eagerly over the rocks, then signalling to some one on their own side, pointing here and there along the wooded slope beyond her vision; sees him now, with fierce light in his eyes, suddenly clutch Walsh’s sleeve and nod towards some invisible object to the south; sees Walsh toss the butt of his carbine to the shoulder and with quick aim send a bullet driving thither; sees Drummond take the field-glass and, resting it on the eastward ledge, gaze long and fixedly out over the eastward way; sees him start, draw back the glass, wipe the lenses with his silken kerchief, then peer again; sees him drop them with a gesture almost tragic, but she cannot hear the moan that rises to his lips.

“My God! those are Apaches, too.”

XI.

Ten o’clock on a blazing Arizona morning.  The hot sun is pouring down upon the jagged front of a range of heights where occasional clumps of pine and cedar, scrub oak and juniper, seemed the only vegetable products hardy enough to withstand the alternations of intense heat by day and moderate cold by night, or to find sufficient sustenance to eke out a living on so barren a soil.  Out to the eastward, stretching away to an opposite range, lies a sandy desert dotted at wide intervals with little black bunches of “scrub mezquite” and blessed with only one redeeming patch of foliage, the copse of willows and cottonwood here at the mouth of a rock-ribbed defile where a little brook, rising heaven knows how or where among the heights to the west, comes frothing and tumbling down through the windings of the gorge only to bury itself in the burning sands beyond the shade.  So narrow and tortuous is the canon, so precipitous its sides, as to prove conclusively that by no slow process, but by some sudden spasm of nature, was it rent in the face of the range.  And here in its depths, just around one of the sharpest bends, honey-combed out of the solid rock are half a dozen deep lateral fissures and caves where the sunbeams never penetrate, where the air is reasonably cool and still, where on this scorching May morning, far away from home and relatives, two young girls are sheltered by the natural roofs and walls against the fiery sunshine and by a little band of resolute men against the fury of the Apaches.