An Apache Princess

How could he have gone into the spare room at Captain

Wren's, and there made his home as--she--Mrs. Plume had first

suggested? There would not have been room for half his plunder, to say

nothing of himself. "What on earth can Nixon want?" he sleepily asked

himself, "fumbling about there among those cases? Was that a crack or

a snap?" It sounded like both, a splitting of glass, a wrenching of

lock spring or something. "Be careful there!" he managed to call. No

answer. Perhaps it was some one of the big hounds, then, wandering

restlessly about at night. They often did, and--why, yes, that would

account for it. Doors and windows were all wide open here, what was to

prevent? Still, Blakely wished he hadn't extinguished his lamp. He

might then have explored. The sound ceased entirely for a moment, and,

now that he was quite awake, he remembered that the hospital attendant

was no longer with him. Then the sounds must have been made by the

striker or the hounds. Blakely had no dogs of his own. Indeed they

were common property at the post, most of them handed down with the

rest of the public goods and chattels by their predecessors of the ----th.

At all events, he felt far too languid, inert, weak, indifferent or

something. If the striker, he had doubtless come down for cool water. If

the hounds, they were in search of something to eat, and in either case

why bother about it? The incident had so far distracted his thoughts

from the worries of the night that now, at last and in good earnest, he

was dropping to sleep.

But in less than twenty minutes he was broad awake again, with sudden

start--gasping, suffocating, listening in amaze to a volley of

snapping and cracking, half-smothered, from the adjoining room. He

sprang from his bed with a cry of alarm and flung himself through a

thick, hot veil of eddying, yet invisible, smoke, straight for the

communicating doorway, and was brought up standing by banging his head

against the resounding pine, tight shut instead of open as he had left

it, and refusing to yield to furious battering. It was locked, bolted,

or barred from the other side. Blindly he turned and rushed for the

side porch and the open air, stumbling against the striker as the

latter came clattering headlong down from aloft. Then together they

rushed to the parlor window, now cracking and splitting from the

furious heat within. A volume of black fume came belching forth,

driven and lashed by ruddy tongues of flame within, and their shouts

for aid went up on the wings of the dawn, and the infantry sentry on

the eastward post came running to see; caught one glimpse of the glare

at that southward window; bang went his rifle with a ring that came

echoing back from the opposite cliffs, as all Camp Sandy sprang from

its bed in answer to the stentorian shout "Fire! No. 5!"