A Wounded Name | Page 2

with unruffled suavity.
Nothing could equal Sancho's equanimity in the presence of those he
desired to placate; nothing exceed the frenzy of his wrath when angered
by those whom he could harm without fear of reprisals. Blake was
backed by a troop of horse and the conviction that Sancho was an
unmitigated rascal; therefore were his palpable allusions to be accepted
as mere pleasantries or deprecated as unmerited injustice. Blake had
blackened the character of the ranch cuisine, even if he had been
unequal to the task of blackening that of the owner. Blake had declared
Sancho's homestead to be a den of thieves, and the repast tendered the
stage passengers a Barmecide feast--the purport of which was duly
reported to Sancho, who declared he would ultimately carve his
opinion of Blake on that officer's elongated carcass, and until he could
find opportunity so to do it behooved him to lull the suspicions of the
prospective victim by elaborate courtesy of manner, and of this is the
Spaniard or his Mexican half-brother consummate master. Blake left
without a glimpse of his glass, but not without another of "the daughter

of my brother" but recently arrived, and that peep made him desirous of
a third. Riding away, he waved his hand.
"Adios, Sancho; hasta otra vista!" he had hailed, but his gaze sought
the little window in the adobe wall where a pair of dark, languorous
eyes peered out from between the parted curtains and a dusky face
dodged out of view the instant it saw it was seen. What Sancho said in
answer is not recorded, but now he was watching the coming of the
stage from Yuma. Some one had warned him Lieutenant Blake would
return that way, ordered back to the old post to the north as witness
before an important court-martial.
Those were later termed "the days of the Empire" in Arizona. Perhaps
five thousand souls were counted within its borders at the time our
story opens, not counting the soulless Apaches. Arizona had the
customary territorial equipment of a governor, certain other officials
constituting the cabinet, and a secretary. Nine men out of the dozen
Americans in the only approach to a town it then
possessed--Tucson--would have said "Damfino" if asked who was the
secretary, but all men knew the sheriff. The grave, cigarro-smoking,
serape-shrouded caballeros who rode at will through the plaza and
ogled dark-eyed maidens peeping from their barred windows, could
harbor no interest in the question of who was president of the United
States, but the name of the post commander at Grant, Lowell or
Crittenden was a household word, and in the eyes of the populace the
second lieutenant commanding the paymaster's escort was illimitably
"a bigger man" than the thrice distinguished soldier and citizen whose
sole monument, up to that time, was the flagstaff at the adobe corral
and barracks sacred to his name. Mr. Blake had never been in such a
God-forsaken country or community before, but there was something in
the utter isolation, the far-stretching waste of shimmering sand, the
desolate mountain ranges sharply outlined, hostile and forbidding, the
springless, streamless, verdureless plains of this stricken land, that
harmonized with the somewhat savage and cynical humor in which he
had sought service in the most intolerable clime then open to the troops
of Uncle Sam. Blake had been jilted and took it bitterly to heart.
Wearing the willow himself, he cherished it as the only green and

growing thing in the Gila valley; whereas, had he sought sympathy he
would have found other young gentlemen similarly decorated, and
therefore as content as he to spend the months or possibly years of their
embittered life just as far from the madding crowd and, as Blake
cynically put it, "as near hell." Blake was a man of distinction, as
relatives went, and those were days when friends at court had more to
do with a fellow's sphere of duty--very much more--than had the
regimental commander or even the adjutant-general. Blake took
Arizona in preference to a tour in the signal office at Washington. He
wanted to get as far away from the national capital and the favorite
haunt of "the Army and Navy forever" as he possibly could. It was the
most natural thing in the world to him that he should ask for duty in the
land of deserts, centipedes, rattlesnakes, and Apaches. He put it on the
ground of serious bronchial trouble which could be cured only in a dry
climate, but the war office knew as well as the navy department that it
was an affair of the heart and not of the throat. He wasn't the first man,
by any manner of means, to fall in love with Madeleine Torrance, the
prettiest girl and most unprincipled flirt that ever