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“Did he answer?”

“Not a word, sir.”

“Count your horses, sergeant, and see if all are here,” was ordered. Then we hurried over to Murphy’s post.

“Who was the man? Could you make him out?”

“Not plainly, sir; but I think it was one of our own command,” and poor Murphy hesitated and stammered. He hated to “give away,” as he expressed it, one of his own troop. But his questioners were inexorable.

“What man did this one most look like, so far as you could judge?”

“Well, sir, I hate to suspicion anybody, but ’twas more like Corporal Potts he looked. Sure, if ’twas him, he must ha’ been drinkin’, for the corporal’s not the man to try and run off a horse when he’s in his sober sinses.”

The waning moon gave hardly enough light for effective search, but we did our best. Blake came out and joined us, looking very grave when he heard the news. Eleven o’clock came, and we gave it up. Not a sign of the marauder could we find. Potts was still absent from the bivouac when we got back, but Blake determined to make no further effort to find him. Long before midnight we were all soundly sleeping, and the next thing I knew my orderly was shaking me by the arm and announcing breakfast. Reveille was just being sounded up at the garrison. The sun had not yet climbed high enough to peep over the Matitzal, but it was broad daylight. In ten minutes Carroll and I were enjoying our coffee and frijoles; Blake had ridden up into the garrison. Potts was still absent; and so, as we expected, was Mr. Gleason.

Half an hour more, and in long column of twos, and followed by our pack-train, the command was filing out along the road whereon “No. 3” had seen the ambulance darting by in the darkness. Blake had come back from the post with a flush of anger on his face and with lips compressed. He did not even dismount. “Saddle up at once” was all he said until he gave the commands to mount and march. Opposite the quarters of the commanding officer we were riding at ease, and there he shook his gauntleted fist at the whitewashed walls, and had recourse to his usual safety-valve,–

“‘Take heed, my lords, the welfare of us all
Hangs on the cutting short that fraudful man,’

and may the devil fly away with him! What d’ye think he told me when I went to hunt him up?”

There was no suitable conjecture.

“He said to march ahead, leaving his horse, Potts’s, and his orderly’s, also the pack-mule: he would follow at his leisure. He had given Potts authority to wait and go with him, but did not consider it necessary to notify me.”

“Where was he?”

“Still at the store, playing with the trader and some understrappers. Didn’t seem to be drunk, either.”

And that was the last we heard of our commander until late in the evening. We were then in bivouac on the west bank of the Sandy within short rifle-range of the buildings of Crocker’s Ranch on the other side. There the lights burned brightly, and some of our people who had gone across had been courteously received, despite a certain constraint and nervousness displayed by the two brothers. At “Starlight,” however, nearly a mile away from us, all was silence and darkness. We had studied it curiously as we marched up along the west shore, and some of the men had asked permission to fall out and ride over there, “just to see it,” but Blake had refused. The Sandy was easily fordable on horseback anywhere, and the Crockers, for the convenience of their ranch people, had placed a lot of bowlders and heaps of stones in such position that they served as a foot-path opposite their corrals. But Blake said he would rather none of his people intruded at “Starlight,” and so it happened that we were around the fire when Gleason rode in about nine o’clock, and with him Lieutenant Baker, also the recreant Potts.