Foes in Ambush | Page 4

in thirty
minutes.--Drop those cards now, you men; you should have been
sleeping as I told you, so as to be ready for work to-night."
"Shure we don't go to-night, sergeant?"
"Who says that?" demanded Feeny, quickly, whirling upon his
subordinates. The corporal looked embarrassed and turned to Moreno
for support. Moreno, profoundly calm, was as profoundly oblivious.
"Moreno there," began Murphy, finding himself compelled to speak.
"I?" gravely, courteously protested the Mexican, with deprecatory
shrug of his shoulders and upward lift of eyebrow. "I? What know I? I
do but say the Corporal Donovan is not come. How know I you go not
out to-night?"
"Neither you nor the likes of you knows," was Feeny's stern retort. "We
go when we will and no questions asked. As for you, Murphy, you be
ready, and it's me you'll ask, not any outsider, when we go. I've had
enough to swear at to-day without you fellows playing off on me. Go or
no go--no liquor, mind you. The first man I catch drinking I'll tie by the
thumbs to the back of the ambulance, and he'll foot it to Stoneman."
No words were wasted in remonstrance or reply. These were indeed

"the days of the empire" in Arizona,--days soon after the great war of
the rebellion, when men drank and swore and fought and gambled in
the rough life of their exile, but obeyed, and obeyed without question,
the officers appointed over them. These were the days when veteran
sergeants like Feeny--men who had served under St. George Cooke and
Sumner and Harney on the wide frontier before the war, who had
ridden with the starry guidons in many a wild, whirling charge under
Sheridan and Merritt and Custer in the valley of Virginia--held almost
despotic powers among the troopers who spent that enlistment in the
isolation of Arizona. Rare were the cases when they abused their
privilege. Stern was their rule, rude their speech, but by officers and
men alike they were trusted and respected. As for Feeny, there were not
lacking those who declared him spoiled. Twice that day had the
paymaster been on the point of rebuking his apparent indifference.
Twice had he withheld his censure, knowing, after all, Feeny to be in
the right and himself in the wrong. And now in the gathering shades of
night, as he stood in silence watching the brisk process of grooming,
and noted how thorough and business-like, even though sharp and stern,
was Feeny, the paymaster was wishing he had not ventured to disregard
the caution of so skilled a veteran.
And yet the paymaster, having a human heart in his breast, had been
sorely tried, for the appeal that came for help was one he could not well
resist. Passing Ceralvo's at midnight and pushing relentlessly ahead
instead of halting there as the men had hoped, the party was challenged
in the Mexican tongue.
"Que viene?"
To which unlooked-for and uncalled-for demand the leading trooper,
scorning Greaser interference in American territory, promptly
answered,--
"Go to hell!"
All the same he heard the click of lock and was prompt to draw his own
Colt, as did likewise the little squad riding ahead of the creaking
ambulance. The two leaders of the mules whirled instantly about and

became tangled up with the wheel team, and the paymaster was pitched
out of a dream into a doubled-up mass on the opposite seat. To his
startled questions the driver could only make reply that he didn't know
what was the matter; the sergeant had gone ahead to see. Presently
Feeny shouted "Forward!" and on they went again, and not until
Ceralvo's was a mile behind could the major learn the cause of the
detention. "Some of Ceralvo's people," answered Feeny, "damn their
impudence! They thought to stop us and turn us in there by stories of
Indian raids just below us,--three prospectors murdered twenty-four
miles this side of the Sonora line. Cochises's people never came this far
west of the Chiricahua Range. It's white cut-throats maybe, and we'll
need our whole command."
And yet in the glaring sunshine of that May morning, after they had
unsaddled at Moreno's, after the sergeant, wearied with the vigils of
two successive nights, had gone to sleep in the coolest shade he could
find, there came riding across the sun-baked, cactus-dotted plain at the
west a young man who had the features of the American and the grave,
courteous bearing of the Mexican.
"My name is Harvey," said he. "My sisters, who have been in San
Francisco at school, are with me on the way to visit our parents in
Tucson. Father was to have met us at the Bend with relays of mules.
We have waited forty-eight hours and can wait no longer. For God's
sake let half