The sergeant caught at the rifle of the sharpshooter, and pressed it down.

“Look!” he whispered.  “He is a scout.  He is searching the trail for the tracks of our ponies.  If you fire they will hear it a league away.”

“But if he finds our trail and returns—­”

The sergeant shook his head.  “I let him pass forward,” he said grimly.  “He will never return.”

Chesterton pounced upon the half-buried matchbox, and in a panic lest he might again lose it, thrust it inside his tunic.

“Little do you know, El Capitan,” he exclaimed breathlessly, as he scrambled back into the saddle and lifted the pony into a gallop, “what a narrow escape I had.  I almost lost it.”

Toward midnight they came to a wooden bridge swinging above a ravine in which a mountain stream, forty feet below, splashed over half-hidden rocks, and the stepping stones of the ford.  Even before the campaign began the bridge had outlived its usefulness, and the unwonted burden of artillery, and the vibrations of marching men had so shaken it that it swayed like a house of cards.  Threatened by its own weight, at the mercy of the first tropic storm, it hung a death trap for the one who first added to its burden.

No sooner had El Capitan struck it squarely with his four hoofs, than he reared and, whirling, sprang back to the solid earth.  The suddenness of his retreat had all but thrown Chesterton, but he regained his seat, and digging the pony roughly with his spurs, pulled his head again toward the bridge.

“What are you shying at, now?” he panted.  “That’s a perfectly good bridge.”

For a minute horse and man struggled for the mastery, the horse spinning in short circles, the man pulling, tugging, urging him with knees and spurs.  The first round ended in a draw.  There were two more rounds with the advantage slightly in favor of El Capitan, for he did not approach the bridge.

The night was warm and the exertion violent.  Chesterton, puzzled and annoyed, paused to regain his breath and his temper.  Below him, in the ravine, the shallow waters of the ford called to him, suggesting a pleasant compromise.  He turned his eyes downward and saw hanging over the water what appeared to be a white bird upon the lower limb of a dead tree.  He knew it to be an orchid, an especially rare orchid, and he knew, also, that the orchid was the favorite flower of Miss Armitage.  In a moment he was on his feet, and with the reins over his arm, was slipping down the bank, dragging El Capitan behind him.  He ripped from the dead tree the bark to which the orchid was clinging, and with wet moss and grass packed it in his leather camera case.  The camera he abandoned on the path.  He always could buy another camera; he could not again carry a white orchid, plucked in the heart of the tropics on the night peace was declared, to the girl he left behind him.  Followed by El Capitan, nosing and snuffing gratefully at the cool waters, he waded the ford, and with his camera case swinging from his shoulder, galloped up the opposite bank and back into the trail.