Ambush by Luke; Short Page B

figure that when Brierly pulled me off the Peak, he wanted me to work. He’ll send word to the reservation and across the border that something is about to start. That will pull in all the malcontents, and the lads who want a good fight.” He paused. “All this is maybe.”
    â€œIt’s too damn true,” Frank Holly said.
    Linus looked at him. “You sorry about it?”
    â€œSorry I get paid?” Holly asked sourly. “No, it ain’t that. I’d get paid the same amount of money to fight half as many. It’s just that a few of them are too many.”
    Harcourt, in the paymaster’s department, said smugly, “I’ll read all about it in the Santa Fe paper. ‘Army chases Apaches. Diablito is headed for security of Hellangone Mountains. Captain Loring, scion of wealthy New York family, says; “I intend to send Diablito’s hide to my boot-maker for my next pair of boots.”’”
    Loring smiled perfunctorily and said, “I’d like to, at that.”
    Ward had been watching Loring, a faint curiosity stirring in him as to why he had asked his question, and as to what sort of a man he really was. This was the man Ann Dunnifon favored, and Ward tried to remember what he had heard of him, since he arrived at Gamble in the spring and Ward had never served with him. Loring, so the talk went, was a good enough officer. He was rich in his own right, from a well-known York state family, and the envy of the garrison’s younger officers. He had, in the romantic fashion of the cavaliers, adopted arms as his profession. He was the gentleman soldier, a throwback to distant times, and therefore a curiosity to his fellow officers who were hardworking, capable, and ordinarily poor men. He was, Ward guessed, humorless, earnest, and privately aloof, but possessed of a calm self-assurance that would attract a fatherless girl like Ann Dunnifon. Above all else, Ward mused, he would be correct in all things.
    The brief breakfast of cold meat sandwiches and scalding coffee finished, the detail started off again, and now Loring put out flankers as they entered the canyon country. Off to the north, Bailey’s Peak, in the new day, towered over all this country, dominating it. Corporal Baltizar, with half the detail, drew the rear position in the dust of the Daugherty wagon; they rode with neckerchiefs across their mouths, slacked in the saddle, and only half awake and bitterly patient. Loring and Holly were in the lead, and Ward, beside Linus, saw the dark stain of perspiration begin to spread on Loring’s back at the first touch of the blasting sun.
    They rested in midmorning and changed flankers and the positions of the detail, and went on again, and Ward sat slack and somnolent in the saddle, feeling the hourly increase in heat. It was dry, savage, merciless, and he liked it. The land, of a sameness that was soporific, was a dun-colored waste of rock and sage clumps and mesquite tangles, and it was never wholly level, so that the twisting road accommodated itself to an endless upthrust of eroded mesa and slope of canyon floor. And always Bailey’s Peak was seldom out of sight, wheeling slowly on their left and scarcely diminishing in size or changing in aspect.
    Loring was driving for the noon halt, angling across a sandy arroyo that brought labor to the horses. The far bank achieved, Ward saw the tracks, and pulled out of the column. Holly, on Loring’s right, saw them the same instant and said, “Hold on,” and Loring brought the column out of the wash and then halted it.
    Loring called now from the front of the column, “How new?” and Ward dismounted. His glance raised briefly, irritably, to the flanker on the right who, riding forward, should have noticed the sign. He had lagged, however, and had reined up on the bank of the wash and was looking at the ground. Ward pointed with his chin to Holly and said indifferently, “Ask your