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