Thurstane, though not fond of Mrs. Stanley, would not now laugh at her
expense, and took no notice of the sarcasm. Glover, fearful lest he had
offended, doubled the gravity of his expression and tacked over to a fresh
subject.

"Shouldn't know whether to feel proud 'f myself or not, 'f I'd made this
country, Capm. Depends on what 'twas meant for. If 'twas meant to live in,
it's the poorest outfit I ever did see. If 'twas meant to scare folks,
it's jest up to the mark. 'Nuff to frighten a crow into fits. Capm, it
fairly seems more than airthly; puts me in mind 'f things in the Pilgrim's
Progress--only worse. Sh'd say it was like five thousin' Valleys 'f the
Shadow 'f Death tangled together. Tell ye, believe Christian 'd 'a' backed
out 'f he'd had to travel through here. Think Mr. Coronado 's all right in
his top hamper, Capm? Do, hey? Wal, then I'm all wrong; guess I'm 's
crazy's a bedbug. Wouldn't 'a'ketched me steerin' this course of my own
free will 'n' foreknowledge. Jest look at the land now. Don't it look like
the bottomless pit blowed up 'n' gone to smash? Tell ye, 'f the Old Boy
himself sh'd ride up alongside, shouldn't be a mite s'prised to see him.
Sh'd reckon he had a much bigger right to be s'prised to ketch me here."

After some further riding, shaking his sandy head, staring about him and
whistling, he broke out again.

"Tell ye, Capm, this beats my imagination. Used to think I c'd yarn it
pooty consid'able. But never can tell this. Never can do no manner 'f
jestice to it. Look a there now. There's a nateral bridge, or 'n unnateral
one. There's a hole blowed through a forty foot rock 's clean 's though
'twas done with Satan's own field-piece, sech 's Milton tells about. An'
there's a steeple higher 'n our big one in Fair Haven. An' there's a
church, 'n' a haystack. If the devil hain't done his biggest celebratin'
'n' carpenterin' 'n' farmin' round here, d'no 's I know where he has done
it. Beats _me_, Capm; cleans me out. Can't do no jestice to it. Can't talk
about it. Seems to me 's though I was a fool."

Yes, even Phineas Glover's small and sinewy soul (a psyche of the size,
muscular force, and agility of a flea) had been seized, oppressed, and in
a manner smashed by the hideous sublimity of this wilderness of sandstone,
basalt, and granite.

Two hours passed, during which, from the nature of the ground, the
travellers could neither see nor be seen by their pursuers. Then came a
breathless ascent up another of the monstrous sandstone terraces.
Thurstane ordered every man to dismount, so as to spare the beasts as much
as possible. He walked by the side of Clara, patting, coaxing, and
cheering her suffering horse, and occasionally giving a heave of his solid
shoulder against the trembling haunches.

"Let me walk," the girl presently said. "I can't bear to see the poor
beast so worried."

"It would be better, if you can do it," he replied, remembering that she
might soon have to call upon the animal for speed.

She dismounted, clasped her hands over his arm, and clambered thus. From
time to time, when some rocky step was to be surmounted, he lifted her
bodily up it.

"How can you be so strong?" she said, looking at him wonderingly and
gratefully.

"Miss Van Diemen, you give me strength," he could not help responding.

At last they were at the summit of the rugged slope. The animals were
trembling and covered with sweat; some of them uttered piteous whinnyings,
or rather bleatings, like distressed sheep; five or six lay down with
hollow moans and rumblings. It was absolutely necessary to take a short
rest.

Looking ahead, Thurstane saw that they had reached the top of the
tableland which lies south of the San Juan, and that nothing was before
them for the rest of the day but a rolling plateau seamed with meandering
fissures of undiscoverable depth. Traversable as the country was, however,
there was one reason for extreme anxiety. If they should lose the trail,
if they should get on the wrong side of one of those profound and endless
chasms, they might reach the river at a point where descent to it would be
impossible, and might die of thirst within sight of water. For undoubtedly
the San Juan flowed at the bottom of one of those amazing canons which
gully this Mer de Glace in stone.

An error of direction once committed, the enemy would not give them time
to retrieve it, and they would be slaughtered like mad dogs with the foam
on their mouths.

Thurstane remembered that it would be his terrible duty in the last
extremity to send a bullet through the heart of the woman he worshipped,
rather than let her fall into the hands of brutes who would only grant her
a death of torture and dishonor. Even his steady soul failed for a moment,
and tears of desperation gathered in his eyes. For the first time in years
he looked up to heaven and prayed fervently.

From the unknown destiny ahead he turned to look for the fate which
pursued. Walking with Coronado to the brink of the colossal terrace, and
sheltering himself from the view of the rest of the party, he scanned the
trail with his glass. The dark line had now become a series of dark
specks, more than a hundred and fifty in number, creeping along the arid
floor of the lower plateau, and reminding him of venomous insects.

"They are not five miles from us," shuddered the Mexican. "Cursed beasts!
Devils of hell!"

"They have this hill to climb," said Thurstane, "and, if I am not
mistaken, they will have to halt here, as we have done. Their ponies must
be pretty well fagged by this time."

"They will get a last canter out of them," murmured Coronado. His soul was
giving way under his hardships, and it would have been a solace to him to
weep aloud. As it was, he relieved himself with a storm of blasphemies.
Oaths often serve to a man as tears do to a woman.

"We must trot now," he said presently.

"Not yet. Not till they are within half a mile of us. We must spare our
wind up to the last minute."

They were interrupted by a cry of surprise and alarm. Several of the
muleteers had strayed to the edge of the declivity, and had discovered
with their unaided eyesight the little cloud of death in the distance.
Texas Smith approached, looked from under his shading hand, muttered a
single curse, walked back to his horse, inspected his girths, and recapped
his rifle. In a minute it was known throughout the train that Apaches were
in the rear. Without a word of direction, and in a gloomy silence which
showed the general despair, the march was resumed. There was a disposition
to force a trot, which was promptly and sternly checked by Thurstane. His
voice was loud and firm; he had instinctively assumed responsibility and
command; no one disputed him or thought of it.

Three mules which could not rise were left where they lay, feebly
struggling to regain their feet and follow their comrades, but falling
back with hollow groanings and a kind of human despair in their faces.
Mile after mile the retreat continued, always at a walk, but without
halting. It was long before the Apaches were seen again, for the ascent of
the plateau lost them a considerable space, and after that they were
hidden for a time by its undulations. But about four in the afternoon,
while the emigrants were still at least five miles from the river, a group
of savage horsemen rose on a knoll not more than three miles behind, and
uttered a yell of triumph. There was a brief panic, and another attempt to
push the animals, which Thurstane checked with levelled pistol.

The train had already entered a gully. As this gully advanced it rapidly
broadened and deepened into a canon. It was the track of an extinct river
which had once flowed into the San Juan on its way to the distant Pacific.
Its windings hid the desired goal; the fugitives must plunge into it
blindfold; whatever fate it brought them, they must accept it. They were
like men who should enter the cavern of unknown goblins to escape from
demons who were following visibly on their footsteps.

From time to time they heard ferocious yells in their rear, and beheld
their fiendish pursuers, now also in the canon. It was like Christian
tracking the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and listening to the screams
and curses of devils. At every reappearance of the Apaches they had
diminished the distance between themselves and their expected prey, and at
last they were evidently not more than a mile behind. But there in sight
was the river; there, enclosed in one of its bends, was an alluvial plain;
rising from the extreme verge of the plain, and overhanging the stream,
was a bluff; and on this bluff was what seemed to be a fortress.

Thurstane sent all the horsemen to the rear of the train, took post
himself as the rearmost man, measured once more with his eye the space
between his charge and the enemy, cast an anxious glance at the reeling
beast which bore Clara, and in a firm ringing voice commanded a trot.

The order and the movement which followed it were answered by the Indians
with a yell. The monstrous and precipitous walls of the canon clamored
back a fiendish mockery of echoes which seemed to call for the prowlers of
the air to arrive quickly and devour their carrion.




CHAPTER XIX.


The scene was like one of Dore's most extravagant designs of abysses and
shadows. The gorge through which swept this silent flight and screaming
chase was not more than two hundred feet wide, while it was at least
fifteen hundred feet deep, with walls that were mainly sheer precipices.

As the fugitives broke into a trot, the pursuers quickened their pace to a
slow canter. No faster; they were too wise to rush within range of
riflemen who could neither be headed off nor flanked; and their hardy
mustangs were nearly at the last gasp with thirst and with the fatigue of
this tremendous journey. Four hundred yards apart the two parties emerged
from the sublime portal of the canon and entered upon the little alluvial
plain.

To the left glittered the river; but the trail did not turn in that
direction; it led straight at the bluff in the elbow of the current. The
mules and horses followed it in a pack, guided by their acute scent toward
the nearest water, a still invisible brooklet which ran at the base of the
butte. Presently, while yet a mile from the stream, they were seized by a
mania. With a loud beastly cry they broke simultaneously into a run,
nostrils distended and quivering, eyes bloodshot and protruding, heads
thrust forward with fierce eagerness, ungovernably mad after water. There
was no checking the frantic stampede which from this moment thundered with
constantly increasing speed across the plain. No order; the stronger
jostled the weaker; loads were flung to the ground and scattered; the
riders could scarcely keep their seats. Spun out over a line of twenty
rods, the cavalcade was the image of senseless rout.

Of course Thurstane was furious at this seemingly fatal dispersion; and he
trumpeted forth angry shouts of "Steady there in front! Close up in the
rear!"

But before long he guessed the truth--water! "They will rally at the
drinking place," he thought. "Forward the mules!" he yelled. "Steady, you
men here! Hold in your horses. Keep in rear of the women. I'll shoot the
man who takes the lead."

But even Spanish bits could do no more than detain the horses a rod or two
behind the beasts of burden, and the whole panting, snorting mob continued
to rush over the loamy level with astonishing swiftness.

Meanwhile the leading Apaches, not now more than fifty in number, were
swept along by the same whirlwind of brute instinct. They diverged a
little from the trail; their object apparently was to overlap the train
and either head it off or divide it; but their beasts were too frantic to
be governed fully. Before long there were two lines of straggling flight,
running parallel with each other at a distance of perhaps one hundred
yards, and both storming toward the still unseen rivulet. A few arrows
were thrown; four or five unavailing shots were fired in return; the hiss
of shaft and _ping_ of ball crossed each other in air; but no serious and
effective fight commenced or could commence. Both parties, guided and
mastered by their lolling beasts, almost without conflict and almost
without looking at each other, converged helplessly toward a verdant,
shallow depression, through the centre of which loitered a clear streamlet
scarcely less calm than the heaven above. Next they were all together,
panting, plunging, splashing, drinking, mules and horses, white men and
red men, all with no other thought than to quench their thirst.

The Apaches, who had probably made their cruel journey without flasks,
seemed for the moment insatiable and utterly reckless. Many of them rolled
off their tottering ponies into the rivulet, and plunging down their heads
drank like beasts. There were a few minutes of the strangest peace that
ever was seen. It was in vain that two or three of the hardier or fiercer
Chiefs and braves shouted and gestured to their comrades, as if urging
them to commence the attack. Manga Colorada, absorbed by a thirst which
was more burning than revenge, did not at first see the slayer of his boy,
and when he did could not move toward him because of fevered mustangs, who
would not budge from their drinking, or who were staggering blind with
hunger. Thurstane, keeping his horse beside Clara's, watched the lean
figure and restless, irritable face of Delgadito, not ten yards distant.
Mrs. Stanley had halted helplessly so near an Apache boy that he might
have thrust her through with his lance had he not been solely intent upon
water.

It was fortunate for the emigrants that they had reached the stream a few
seconds the sooner. Their thirst was first satiated; and then men and
animals began to draw away from their enemies; for even the mules of white
men instinctively dread and detest the red warriors. This movement was
accelerated by Thurstane, Coronado, Texas Smith, and Sergeant Meyer
calling to one and another in English and Spanish, "This way! this way!"
There seemed to be a chance of massing the party and getting it to some
distance before the Indians could turn their thoughts to blood.

But the manoeuvre was only in part accomplished when battle commenced.
Little Sweeny, finding that his mule was being crowded by an Apache's
horse, uttered some indignant yelps. "Och, ye bloody naygur! Get away wid
yerself. Get over there where ye b'long."

This request not being heeded, he made a clumsy punch with his bayonet and
brought the blood. The warrior uttered a grunt of pain, cast a surprised
angry stare at the shaveling of a Paddy, and thrust with his lance. But he
was probably weak and faint; the weapon merely tore the uniform. Sweeny
instantly fired, and brought down another Apache, quite accidentally.
Then, banging his mule with his heels, he splashed up to Thurstane with
the explanation, "Liftinant, they're the same bloody naygurs. Wan av um
made a poke at me, Liftinant."

"Load your beece!" ordered Sergeant Meyer sternly, "und face the enemy."

By this time there was a fierce confusion of plungings and outcries. Then
came a hiss of arrows, followed instantaneously by the scream of a wounded
man, the report of several muskets, a pinging of balls, more yells of
wounded, and the splash of an Apache in the water. The little streamlet,
lately all crystal and sunshine, was now turbid and bloody. The giant
portals of the canon, although more than a mile distant, sent back echoes
of the musketry. Another battle rendered more horrible the stark, eternal
horror of the desert.

"This way!" Thurstane continued to shout. "Forward, you women; up the hill
with you. Steady, men. Face the enemy. Don't throw away a shot. Steady
with the firing. Steady!"

The hostile parties were already thirty or forty yards apart; and the
emigrants, drawing loosely up the slope, were increasing the distance.
Manga Colorada spurred to the front of his people, shaking his lance and
yelling for a charge. Only half a dozen followed him; his horse fell
almost immediately under a rifle ball; one of the braves picked up the
chief and bore him away; the rest dispersed, prancing and curveting. The
opportunity for mingling with the emigrants and destroying them in a
series of single combats was lost.

Evidently the Apaches, and their mustangs still more, were unfit for
fight. The forty-eight hours of hunger and thirst, and the prodigious
burst of one hundred and twenty miles up and down rugged terraces, had
nearly exhausted their spirits as well as their strength, and left them
incapable of the furious activity necessary in a cavalry battle. The most
remarkable proof of their physical and moral debilitation was that in all
this melee not more than a dozen of them had discharged an arrow.

If they would not attack they must retreat, and that speedily. At fifty
yards' range, armed only with bows and spears, they were at the mercy of
riflemen and could stand only to be slaughtered. There was a hasty flight,
scurrying zigzag, right and left, rearing and plunging, spurring the last
caper out of their mustangs, the whole troop spreading widely, a hundred
marks and no good one. Nevertheless Texas Smith's miraculous aim brought
down first a warrior and then a horse.

By the time the Apaches were out of range the emigrants were well up the
slope of the hill which occupied the extreme elbow of the bend in the
river. It was a bluff or butte of limestone which innumerable years had
converted into marl, and for the most part into earth. A thin turf covered
it; here and there were thickets; more rarely trees. Presently some one
remarked that the sides were terraced. It was true; there were the narrow
flats of soil which had once been gardens; there too were the supporting
walls, more or less ruinous. Curious eyes now turned toward the seeming
mound on the summit, querying whether it might not be the remains of an
antique pueblo.

At this instant Clara uttered a cry of anxiety, "Where is Pepita?"

The girl was gone; a hasty looking about showed that; but whither? Alas!
the only solution to this enigma must be the horrible word, "Apaches." It
seemed the strangest thing conceivable; one moment with the party, and the
next vanished; one moment safe, and the next dead or doomed. Of course the
kidnapping must have been accomplished during the frenzied riot in the
stream, when the two bands were disentangling amid an uproar of plungings,
yells, and musket shots. The girl had probably been stunned by a blow, and
then either left to float down the brook or dragged off by some muscular
warrior.

There was a halt, an eager and prolonged lookout over the plain, a
scanning of the now distant Indians through field glasses. Then slowly and
sadly the train resumed its march and mounted to the summit of the butte.

Here, in this land of marvels, there was a new marvel. Incredible as the
thing seemed, so incredible that they had not at first believed their
eyes, they were at the base of the walls of a fortress. A confused,
general murmur broke forth of "Ruins! Pueblos! Casas Grandes! Casas de
Montezuma!"

The architecture, unlike that of Tegua, but similar to that of the ruins
of the Gila, was of adobes. Large cakes of mud, four or five feet long and
two feet thick, had been moulded in cases, dried in the sun, and laid in
regular courses to the height of twenty feet. Centuries (perhaps) of
exposure to weather had so cracked, guttered, and gnawed this destructible
material, that at a distance the pile looked not unlike the natural
monuments which fire and water have builded in this enchanted land, and
had therefore not been recognized by the travellers as human handiwork.

What they now saw was a rampart which ran along the brow of the bluff for
several hundred yards. Originally twenty feet high, it had been so
fissured by the rains and crumbled by the winds, that it resembled a
series of peaks united here and there in a plane surface. Some of the gaps
reached nearly to the ground, and through these it could be seen that the
wall was five feet across, a single adobe forming the entire thickness.
All along the base the dampness of the earth had eaten away the clay, so
that in many places the structure was tottering to its fall.

Filing to the left a few yards, the emigrants found a deep fissure through
which the animals stumbled one by one over mounds of crumbled adobes.
Thurstane, entering last, looked around him in wonder. He was inside a
quadrilateral enclosure, apparently four hundred yards in length by two
hundred and fifty in breadth, the walls throughout being the same mass of
adobe work, fissured, jagged, gray, solemn, and in their utter
solitariness sublime.

But this was not the whole ruin; the fortress had a citadel. In one corner
of the enclosure stood a tower-like structure, forty-five or fifty feet
square and thirty in altitude, surmounted on its outer angle by a smaller
tower, also four-sided, which rose some twelve or fourteen feet higher. It
was not isolated, but built into an angle of the outer rampart, so as to
form with it one solid mass of fortification. The material was adobe; but,
unlike the other ruins, it was in good condition; some species of roofing
had preserved the walls from guttering; not a crevice deformed their gray,
blank, dreary faces.

Instinctively and without need of command the emigrants had pushed on
toward this edifice. It was to be their fortress; in it and around it they
must fight for life against the Apaches; here, where a nameless people had
perished, they must conquer or perish also. Thurstane posted Kelly and one
of the Mexicans on the exterior wall to watch the movements of the savage
horde in the plain below. Then he followed the others to the deserted
citadel.

Two doorways, one on each of the faces which looked into the enclosure,
offered ingress. They were similar in size and shape, seven feet and a
half in height by four in breadth, and tapering toward the summit like the
portals of the temple-builders of Central America. Inside were solid mud
floors, strewn with gray dust and showing here and there a gleam of broken
pottery, the whole brooded over by obscurity. It was discoverable,
however, that the room within was of considerable height and size.

There was a hesitation about entering. It seemed as if the ghosts of the
nameless people forbade it. This had been the abode of men who perhaps
inhabited America before the coming of Columbus. Here possibly the
ancestors of Montezuma had stayed their migrations from the mounds of the
Ohio to the pyramids of Cholula and Tenochtitlan. Or here had lived the
Moquis, or the Zunians, or the Lagunas, before they sought refuge from the
red tribes of the north upon the buttes south of the Sierra del Carrizo.
Here at all events had once palpitated a civilization which was now a
ghost.

"This is to be our home for a little while," said Thurstane to Clara.
"Will you dismount? I will run in and turn out the snakes, if there are
any. Sergeant, keep your men and a few others ready to repel an attack.
Now, fellows, off with the packs."

Producing a couple of wax tapers, he lighted them, handed one to Coronado,
and led the way into the silent Casa de Montezuma. They were in a hall
about ten feet high, fifteen feet broad, and forty feet long, which
evidently ran across the whole front of the building. The walls were
hard-finished and adorned with etchings in vermilion of animals,
geometrical figures, and nondescript grotesques, all of the rudest design
and disposed without regard to order. A doorway led into a small central
room, and from that doorways opened into three more rooms, one on each
side.

The ceilings of all the rooms were supported by unhewn beams, five or six
inches thick, deeply inserted into the adobe walls. In the ceiling of the
rearmost hall (the one which had no direct outlet upon the enclosure) was
a trapdoor which offered the only access to the stories above. A rude but
solid ladder, consisting of two beams with steps chopped into them, was
still standing here. With a vague sense of intrusion, half expecting that
the old inhabitants would appear and order them away, Thurstane and
Coronado ascended. The second story resembled the first, and above was
another of the same pattern. Then came a nearly flat roof; and here they
found something remarkable. It was a solid sheathing or tiling, made of
slates of baked and glazed pottery, laid with great exactness, admirably
cemented and projecting well over the eaves. This it was which had enabled
the adobes beneath to endure for years, and perhaps for centuries, in
spite of the lapping of rains and the gnawing of winds.

On the outermost corner of the structure, overlooking the eddying, foaming
bend of the San Juan, rose the isolated tower. It contained a single room,
walled with hard-finish and profusely etched with figures in vermilion. No
furniture anywhere, nor utensils, nor relics, excepting bits of pottery,
precisely such as is made now by the Moquis, various in color, red, white,
grayish, and black, much of it painted inside as well as out, and all
adorned with diamond patterns and other geometrical outlines.

"I have seen Casas Grandes in other places," said Coronado, "but nothing
like this. This is the only one that I ever found entire. The others are
in ruins, the roofs fallen in, the beams charred, etc."

"This was not taken," decided the Lieutenant, after a tactical meditation.
"This must have been abandoned by its inhabitants. Pestilence, or
starvation, or migration."

"We can beat off all the Apaches in New Mexico," observed Coronado, with
something like cheerfulness.

"We can whip everything but our own stomachs," replied Thurstane.

"We have as much food as those devils."

"But water?" suggested the forethoughted West Pointer.

It was a horrible doubt, for if there was no water in the enclosure, they
were doomed to speedy and cruel death, unless they could beat the Indians
in the field and drive them away from the rivulet.




CHAPTER XX.


When Thurstane came out of the Casa Grande he would have given some years
of his life to know that there was water in the enclosure.

Yet so well disciplined was the soul of this veteran of twenty-three, and
so thoroughly had he acquired the wise soldierly habit of wearing a mask
of cheer over trouble, that he met Clara and Mrs. Stanley with a smile and
a bit of small talk.

"Ladies, can you keep house?" he said. "There are sixteen rooms ready for
you. The people who moved out haven't left any trumpery. Nothing wanted
but a little sweeping and dusting and a stair carpet."

"We will keep house," replied Clara with a laugh, the girlish gayety of
which delighted him.

Assuming a woman's rightful empire over household matters, she began to
direct concerning storage, lodgment, cooking, etc. Sharp as the climbing
was, she went through all the stories and inspected every room, selecting
the chamber in the tower for herself and Mrs. Stanley.

"I never can get up in this world," declared Aunt Maria, staring in dismay
at the rude ladder. "So this is what Mr. Thurstane meant by talking about
a stair carpet! It was just like him to joke on such a matter. I tell you
I never can go up."

"Av coorse ye can get up," broke in little Sweeny impatiently. "All ye've
got to do is to put wan fut above another an' howld on wid yer ten
fingers."

"I should like to see _you_ do it," returned Aunt Maria, looking
indignantly at the interfering Paddy.

Sweeny immediately shinned up the stepped beam, uttered a neigh of
triumphant laughter from the top, and then skylarked down again.

"Well, _you_ are a man," observed the strong-minded lady, somewhat
discomfited. "Av coorse I'm a man," yelped Sweeny. "Who said I wasn't?
He's a lying informer. Ha ha, hoo hoo, ho ho!"

Thus incited, pulled at moreover from above and boosted from below, Aunt
Maria mounted ladder after ladder until she stood on the roof of the Casa
Grande.

"If I ever go down again, I shall have to drop," she gasped. "I never
expected when I came on this journey to be a sailor and climb maintops."

"Lieutenant Thurstane is waving his hand to us," said Clara, with a smile
like sunlight.

"Let him wave," returned Mrs. Stanley, weary, disconsolate, and out of
patience with everything. "I must say it's a poor place to be waving
hands."

Meantime Thurstane had beckoned a couple of muleteers to follow him, and
set off to beat the enclosure for a spring, or for a spot where it would
be possible to sink a well with good result. Although the search seemed
absurd on such an isolated hill, he had some hopes; for in the first
place, the old inhabitants must have had a large supply of water, and they
could not have brought it up a steep slope of two hundred feet without
great difficulty; in the second place, the butte was of limestone, and in
a limestone region water makes for itself strange reservoirs and outlets.

His trust was well-grounded. In a sharply indented hollow, twenty feet
below the general surface of the enclosure, and not more than thirty yards
from the Casa Grande, he found a copious spring. About it were traces of
stone work, forming a sort of ruinous semicircle, as though a well had
been dug, the neighboring earth scooped out, and the sides of the opening
fenced up with masonry. By the way, he was not the first to discover the
treasure, for the acute senses of the mules had been beforehand with him,
and a number of them were already there drinking.

Calling Meyer, he said, "Sergeant, get a fatigue party to work here. I
want a transverse trench cut below the spring for the animals, and a guard
at the spring itself to keep it clear for the people."

Next he hurried away to the spot where he had posted Kelly to watch the
Apaches.

Climbing the wall, he looked about for the Apaches, and discovered them
about half a mile distant, bivouacked on the bank of the rivulet.

"They have been reinforced, sir," said Kelly. "Stragglers are coming up
every few minutes."

"So I perceive. Have you seen anything of the girl Pepita?"

"There's a figure there, sir, against that sapling, that hasn't moved for
half an hour. I've an idea it's the girl, sir, tied to the sapling."

Thurstane adjusted his glass, took a long steady look, and said sombrely,
"It's the girl. Keep an eye on her. If they start to do anything with her,
let me know. Signal with your cap."

As he hurried back to the Casa Grande he tried to devise some method of
saving this unfortunate. A rescue was impossible, for the savages were
numerous, watchful, and merciless, and in case they were likely to lose
her they would brain her. But she might be ransomed: blankets, clothing,
and perhaps a beast or two could be spared for that purpose; the gold
pieces that he had in his waist-belt should all go of course. The great
fear was lest the brutes should find all bribes poor compared with the
joys of a torture dance. Querying how he could hide this horrible affair
from Clara, and shuddering at the thought that but for favoring chances
she might have shared the fate of Pepita he ran on toward the Casa, waving
his hand cheerfully to the two women on the roof Meantime Clara had been
attending to her housekeeping and Mrs. Stanley had been attending to her
feelings. The elder lady (we dare not yet call her an old lady) was in the
lowest spirits. She tried to brace herself; she crossed her hands behind
her back, man-fashion; she marched up and down the roof man-fashion. All
useless; the transformation didn't work; or, if she was a man, she was a
scared one.

She could not help feeling like one of the spirits in prison as she
glanced at the awful solitude around her. Notwithstanding the river, there
still was the desert. The little plain was but an oasis. Two miles to the
east the San Juan burst out of a defile of sandstone, and a mile to the
west it disappeared in a similar chasm. The walls of these gorges rose
abruptly two thousand feet above the hurrying waters. All around were the
monstrous, arid, herbless, savage, cruel ramparts of the plateau. No
outlook anywhere; the longest reach of the eye was not five miles; then
came towering precipices. The travellers were like ants gathered on an
inch of earth at the bottom of a fissure in a quarry. The horizon was
elevated and limited, resting everywhere on harsh lines of rock which were
at once near the spectator and far above him. The overhanging plateaux
strove to shut him out from the sight of heaven.

What variety there was in the grim monotony appeared in shapes that were
horrible to the weary and sorrowful. On the other side of the San Juan
towered an assemblage of pinnacles which looked like statues; but these
statues were a thousand feet above the stream, and the smallest of them
was at least four hundred feet high. To a lost wanderer, and especially to
a dispirited woman, such magnitude was not sublime, but terrifying. It
seemed as if these shapes were gods who had no mercy, or demons who were
full of malevolence. Still higher, on a jutting crag which overhung the
black river, was a castle a hundred fold huger than man ever built, with
ramparts that were dizzy precipices and towers such as no daring could
scale. It faced the horrible group of stony deities as if it were their
pandemonium.

The whole landscape was a hideous Walhalla, a fit abode for the savage
giant gods of the old Scandinavians. Thor and Woden would have been at
home in it. The Cyclops and Titans would have been too little for it. The
Olympian deities could not be conceived of as able or willing to exist in
such a hideous chaos. No creature of the Greek imagination would have been
a suitable inhabitant for it except Prometheus alone. Here his eternal
agony and boundless despair might not have been out of place.

There was no comfort in the river. It came out of unknown and inhospitable
mystery, and went into a mystery equally unknown and inhospitable. To what
fate it might lead was as uncertain as whence it arrived. A sombre flood,
reddish brown in certain lights, studded with rocks which raised ghosts of
unmoving foam, flowing with a speed which perpetually boiled and eddied,
promising nothing to the voyager but thousand-fold shipwreck, a breathless
messenger from the mountains to the ocean, it wheeled incessantly from
stony portal to stony portal, a brief gleam of power and cruelty. The
impression which it produced was in unison with the sublime malignity and
horror of the landscape.

Depressed by fatigue, the desperate situation of the party, and the menace
of the frightful scene around her, Mrs. Stanley could not and would not
speak to Thurstane when he mounted the roof, and turned away to hide the
tears in her eyes.

"You see I am housekeeping," said Clara with a smile. "Look how clean the
room in the tower has been swept. I had some brooms made of tufted grass.
There are our beds in the corners. These hard-finished walls are really
handsome."

She stopped, hesitated a moment, looked at him anxiously, and then added,
"Have you seen Pepita?"

"Yes," he replied, deciding to be frank. "I think I have discovered her
tied to a tree."

"Oh! to be tortured!" exclaimed Clara, wringing her hands and beginning to
cry.

"We will ransom her," he hurried on. "I am going down to hold a parley
with the Apaches."

"_You_!" exclaimed the girl, catching his arm. "Oh no! Oh, why did we come
here!"

Fearing lest he should be persuaded to evade what he considered his duty,
he pressed her hand fervently and hurried away. Yes, he repeated, it was
_his_ duty; to parley with the Apaches was a most dangerous enterprise; he
did not feel at liberty to order any other to undertake it.

Finding Coronado, he said to him, "I am going down to ransom Pepita. You
know the Indians better than I do. How many people shall I take?"

A gleam of satisfaction shot across the dark face of the Mexican as he
replied, "Go alone."

"Certainly," he insisted, in response to the officer's stare of surprise.
"If you take a party, they'll doubt you. If you go alone, they'll parley.
But, my dear Lieutenant, you are magnificent. This is the finest moment of
your life. Ah! only you Americans are capable of such impulses. We
Spaniards haven't the nerve."

"I don't know their scoundrelly language."

"Manga Colorada speaks Spanish. I dare say you'll easily come to an
understanding with him. As for ransom, anything that we have, of course,
excepting food, arms, and ammunition. I can furnish a hundred dollars or
so. Go, my dear Lieutenant; go on your noble mission. God be with you."

"You will see that I am covered, if I have to run for it."

"I'll see to everything. I'll line the wall with sharpshooters."

"Post your men. Good-by."