Around Sweeny, who garrisoned the left-hand wagon of the rearmost line, the fight was particularly noisy.  The Apaches saw that he was little, and perhaps they saw that he was afraid of his gun.  They went for him; they were after him with their sharpest sticks; they counted on Sweeny.  The speck of a man sat on the front seat of the wagon, outside of the driver, and fully exposed to the tribulation.  He was in a state of the highest Paddy excitement.  He grinned and bounced like a caravan of monkeys.  But he was not much scared; he was mainly in a furious rage.  Pointing his musket first at one and then at another, he returned yell for yell, and was in fact abusive.

“Oh, fire yer bow-arreys!” he screamed.  “Ye can’t hit the side av a waggin.  Ah, ye bloody, murtherin’ nagers! go ’way wid yer long poles.  I’d fight a hundred av the loikes av ye wid ownly a shillelah.”

One audacious thrust of a lance he parried very dexterously with his bayonet, at the same time screeching defiantly and scornfully in the face of his hideous assailant.  But this fellow’s impudent approach was too much to be endured, and Sweeny proceeded at once to teach him to keep at a more civil distance.

“Oh, ye pokin’ blaggard!” he shouted, and actually let drive with his musket.  The ball missed, but by pure blundering one of the buck-shot took effect, and the brave retreated out of the melee with a sensation as if his head had been split.  Some time later he was discovered sitting up doggedly on a rock, while a comrade was trying to dig the buckshot out of his thick skull with an arrow-point.

“I’ll tache ’em to moind their bizniss,” grinned Sweeny triumphantly, as he reloaded.  “The nasty, hootin’ nagers!  They’ve no rights near a white man, anyhow.”

On the whole, the attack lingered.  The Apaches had done some damage.  One driver had been lanced mortally.  One muleteer had been shot through the heart with an arrow.  Another arrow had scraped Shubert’s ankle.  Another, directed by the whimsical genius of accident, had gone clean through the drooping cartilage of Phineas Glover’s long nose, as if to prepare him for the sporting of jewelled decorations.  Two mules were dead, and several wounded.  The sides of the wagons bristled with shafts, and their canvas tops were pierced with fine holes.  But, on the other hand, the Apaches had lost a dozen horses, three or four warriors killed, and seven or eight wounded.

Such was the condition of affairs around the train when Coronado, Texas Smith, and the four surviving herdsmen came storming back to it.

CHAPTER XII.

The Apaches were discouraged by the immovability of the train, and by the steady and deadly resistance of its defenders.  From first to last some twenty-five or twenty-seven of their warriors had been hit, of whom probably one third were killed or mortally wounded.