the rocky sides, close and closer, until, panting, almost breathless, Costigan reaches the solid bottom of the gorge and swings Drummond to his feet beside him.  Seeing their leader safely down, the men, with one defiant shot and cheer, scurry to the edge of the canon, and come slipping and sliding to join their comrades.  At the mouth of the cave Costigan strives to push Drummond in through the narrow aperture left for their admission, but miscalculates his commander’s idea of the proprieties.  Like gallant Craven at Mobile Bay, Drummond will seek no safety until his men are cared for.  “After you, pilot,” the chivalric sailor’s last word as the green waters engulfed his sinking ship, finds its cavalry echo in Drummond’s “After you, corporal,” in this far-away canon in desert Arizona.  The men have scrambled through the gap, then Costigan, with reluctant backward glance, is hurried in just as a flash of flame and smoke leaps downward from the crest and the foremost Apache sends a hurried, ill-aimed shot at the last man left.  Before another shot can follow, Drummond’s arm is seized by muscular hands and he is dragged within the gap.  Two or three huge stones are rolled into place, and in an instant through the ragged loop-holes the black muzzles of half a dozen carbines are thrusting, and Costigan shouts exultingly, “Now, you black-legged blackguards, come on if ye dare!”

But no Apache is fool enough to attack a strong position.  Keeping well under cover, the Indians soon line the crest and begin sending down a rain of better-aimed bullets at the loop-holes, and every minute the flattened lead comes zipping through.  One of these fearful missiles tears its way through Costigan’s sleeve and, striking poor old Moreno in the groin, stretches him groaning upon the floor.  A glance shows that the wound is mortal, and, despite his crimes, the men who bear him, moaning, in to the farther cave are moved to sudden sympathy as his hapless wife and child prostrate themselves beside his rocky bier.  Drummond can afford to lose no more, and orders the lower half of each hole to be stopped with blankets, blouses, shirts, anything that will block a shot, and then for an hour the fire of the besiegers is harmless, and no longer can the besieged catch even an occasional glimpse of them.  At noon their fire has ceased entirely and, even when breathing a sigh of relief, the men look into one another’s faces questioningly.  How long can this last?  How hot, how close the air in the cave is growing!

Drummond has gone for a moment into the inner chamber, where Moreno is now breathing his last, to inquire for Wing and to speak a word of cheer to his fair and devoted nurses.  Not one murmur of complaint or dread has fallen from their lips, though they know their father to have ridden on perilous quest and into possible ambush; though they know their brother to be lying at the ruined ranch, perhaps seriously wounded; though their own fate may be capture, with