travellers, all was gloom to-night. The bar was silence and darkness.
The bare east room adjoining the corral was tenanted now only by the
clerk and the precious iron box of "greenbacks." No glimmer of lamp
showed there. The westward apartments, opening only one into another
and thence into the corral, were still as the night, and even when a
shutter was slowly pushed from within, as though the occupants craved
more air, no gleam of light came through.

"Don't show your ugly mug out here, Moreno," cautioned Feeny for the
fourth or fifth time, "and warn any damned cut-throat with you to keep
in hiding. The man who attempts to come out gets a bullet through
him."

There had been shrill protestation in Mexican Spanish and Señora
Moreno's strident tones when first he conveyed his orders to the
master of the ranch, but Moreno himself had made no audible reply,
and, as was conjectured, had enjoined silence on his wife, for after
that outbreak she spoke no more.

"I've got this approach covered anyhow," muttered the veteran. "Now if
I only had men to watch those doors into the corral, I could pen
Moreno and whatever he has here at his back. It's that gang of
hell-hounds we passed at Ceralvo's that will pay us a call before
morning, or I'm a duffer."

Once again he found the paymaster wearily, anxiously patrolling his
self-assumed post out beyond the westward wall. The presence of common
danger, the staff official's forgetfulness of self and his funds in
his determination to aid the wretched women whom he firmly believed to
have been run off by the Apaches, had won from the sergeant the