There followed a half hour which seemed like a month.  Once Thurstane stole softly through the Casa to Coronado’s room, found all safe there, and returned, stumbling over bodies both going and coming.  At last the slow dawn came and sent a faint, faint radiance through the door, enabling the benighted eyes within to discover one dolorous object after another.  In the centre of the room lay the boy Shubert, perfectly motionless and no doubt dead.  Here and there, slowly revealing themselves through the diminishing darkness, like horrible waifs left uncovered by a falling river, appeared the bodies of four Apaches, naked to the breechcloth and painted black, all quiet except one which twitched convulsively.  The clay floor was marked by black pools and stains which were undoubtedly blood.  Other fearful blotches were scattered along the entrance, as if grievously wounded men had tottered through it, or slain warriors had been dragged out by their comrades.

While the battle is still in suspense a soldier looks with but faint emotion, and almost without pity, upon the dead and wounded.  They are natural; they belong to the scene; what else should he see?  Moreover, the essential sentiments of the time and place are, first, a hard egoism which thinks mainly of self-preservation, and second, a stern sense of duty which regulates it.  In the fiercer moments of the conflict even these feelings are drowned in a wild excitement which may lie either exultation or terror.  Thus it is that the ordinary sympathies of humanity for the suffering and for the dead are suspended.

Looking at Shubert, our lieutenant simply said to himself, “I have lost a man.  My command is weakened by so much.”  Then his mind turned with promptness to the still living and urgent incidents of the situation.  Could he peep out of the doorway without getting an arrow through the head?  Was the roof of the Casa safe from escalade?  Were any of his people wounded?

This last question he at once put in English and Spanish.  Kelly replied, “Slightly, sir,” and pointed to his left shoulder, pretty smartly laid open by the thrust of a knife.  One of the Indian muleteers, who was sitting propped up in a corner, faintly raised his head and showed a horrible gash in his thigh.  At a sign from Thurstane another muleteer bound up the wound with the sleeve of Shubert’s shirt, which he slashed off for the purpose.  Kelly said, “Never mind me, sir; it’s no great affair, sir.”

“Two killed and two wounded,” thought the lieutenant.  “We are losing more than our proportion.”

As soon as it was light enough to distinguish objects clearly, a lively fire opened from the roof of the Casa.  Judging that the attention of the assailants would be distracted by this, Thurstane cautiously edged his head forward and peeped through the doorway.  The Apaches were still in the plaza; he discovered something like fifty of them; they were jumping about and firing arrows at the roof.  He inferred that this could not last long; that they would soon be driven away by the musketry from above; that, in short, things were going well.