Foes in Ambush

Foes in Ambush, by Charles King

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Title: Foes in Ambush
Author: Charles King
Release Date: February 20, 2006 [EBook #17806]
Language: English
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FOES IN AMBUSH.

BY

CAPT. CHARLES KING, U. S. A.,
AUTHOR OF
"THE COLONEL'S DAUGHTER," "MARION'S FAITH," "KITTY'S
CONQUEST," "A SOLDIER'S SECRET," ETC.

PHILADELPHIA:
J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY.
1893.

COPYRIGHT, 1892,
BY
CHARLES KING.

FOES IN AMBUSH.
I.
The sun was just going down, a hissing globe of fire and torment.
Already the lower limb was in contact with the jagged backbone of the
mountain chain that rimmed the desert with purple and gold. Out on the
barren, hard-baked flat in front of the corral, just where it had been
unhitched when the paymaster and his safe were dumped soon after
dawn, a weather-beaten ambulance was throwing unbroken a mile-long
shadow towards the distant Christobal. The gateway to the east through
the Santa Maria, sharply notched in the gleaming range, stood a day's
march away,--a day's march now only made by night, for this was
Arizona, and from the rising of the sun to the going down of the same
anywhere south of that curdling mud-bath, the Gila, the only human

beings impervious to the fierceness of its rays were the Apaches. "And
they," growled the paymaster, as he petulantly snapped the lock of his
little safe, "they're no more human than so many hyenas."
A big man physically was the custodian and disburser of government
greenbacks,--so big that, as he stepped forth through the aperture in the
hot adobe wall, he ducked his head to avert unwilling contact with its
upper edge. Green-glass goggles, a broad-brimmed straw hat, a pongee
shirt, loose trousers of brown linen, and dust-colored canvas shoes
made up the outer man of a personality as distinctly unmilitary as it
was ponderous. Slow and labored in movement, the major was
correspondingly sluggish in speech. He sauntered out into the glare of
the evening sunshine and became slowly conscious of a desire to swear
at what he saw: that, though in a minute or two the day-god would
"douse his glim" behind the black horizon, no preparation whatever had
been made for a start. There stood the ambulance, every bolt and link
and tire hot as a stove-lid, but not a mule in sight. Turning to his left, he
strolled along towards a gap in the adobe wall, and entered the dusty
interior of the corral. One of the four quadrupeds drowsing under the
brush shelter languidly turned an inquiring eye and interrogative ear in
his direction, and conveyed, after the manner of the mule, a suggestion
as to supper. A Mexican boy sprawling in the shade of a bale of
government hay, and clad in cotton shirt and trousers well-nigh as
brown as the skin that peeped through occasional gaps, glanced up at
him with languid interest an instant, and then resumed the more
agreeable contemplation of the writhings of an impaled tarantula.
Under another section of the shed two placid little burros were dreamily
blinking at vacancy, their grizzled fronts expressive of that ineffable
peace found only in the faces of saints and donkeys. In the middle of
the enclosure a rude windlass coiled with rope stood stretching forth a
decrepit lever-arm. The whippletree, dangling from the end over the
beaten circular track, seemed cracked with heat and age. The stout rope
that stretched tautly from the coil passed over a wooden wheel, and
disappeared through a broad-framed aperture into the bowels of the
earth. Close at hand in the shade of a brush-covered "leanto" hung three
or four huge ollas, earthen water-jars, swathed in gunny sack and
blanket. Beyond them, warped out of all possibility of future usefulness,

stood what had once been the running gear of a California buck-board.
Behind it dangled from dusty pegs portions of leather harness, which
all the neat's-foot oil of the military pharmacopoeia could never again
restore to softness or pliability. A newer edition of the same class of
vehicle was covered by a canvas "'paulin." A huge stack of barley bags
was piled at the far end of the corral, guarded from depredation
(quadrupedal) by a barrier of wooden slats, mostly down, and by a
tattered biped, very sound asleep.
"Where's the sergeant?" queried the paymaster, slowly,