"Tell 'Tonio to take this straight to General Archer," said he.
"I don't recognize your right to order my scouts about, Willett. I need 'Tonio here."
"You'll have him again in twenty minutes," was the conciliatory answer. "This is by Archer's own order, Harris. I've come straight from his side. Otherwise I'll interfere with you as little as possible."
And Harris, with one look of distrust in his comrade's flushing face, turned quietly to 'Tonio, said barely ten words to his second, not one to his senior, then bitterly spurred ahead.
He was not the first man in the profession of arms to realize what it is to faithfully and persistently labor to develop, instruct and discipline a body of men until he and they are working in absolute accord, all the intricate parts of the human machine nicely adjusted and moving without the faintest friction, and then to find himself at the eleventh hour set to one side, a stranger to his men and a rival to himself set in his stead, and be bidden to move on as a sort of martial second fiddle, while the credit and reward go to the new first violin. Nor was Harris the last by any manner of means. As General Archer had himself been heard to say, "One essential of military preferment is a knowledge of the game of euchre--your neighbor." Couple this with utter indifference to the rights of fellow-soldiers, and a catlike capacity to work by stealth in the dark, and there is no starry altitude to which one may not aspire. Harris made the same mistake older soldiers had sometimes made in higher commands, that of sticking to their own men, and duties, without keeping an eye on, and a friend at, headquarters. Anomalous as it may sound, the absent are ever wrong, even when "present for duty," where they should be. If Harris that night had only gone to headquarters instead of his camp; had stopped to see the general instead of starting promptly to the rescue, there would have been less to tell by way of a story.
Possibly a realization of this had already come over him, as angering yet unswerving, he once again overtook the eager leaders among his scouts,--lean, wiry fellows, ever gliding swiftly on in that tireless Apache running walk. Once there again, he kept his broncho at the trot to hold his own, and a broncho trot, after a mile or two of warming up, becomes something besides monotonous. Away to the far front, the north-east, flickered the tiny blazes; guiding lights, as Willett would have it; bale fires, as Harris began to believe--fires set by confederates to blind the eye of the pursuit, or lure pursuers to a trap. Away to the far front, seven miles now, and deep in a nook of the foothills, lay the site of Bennett's ruined ranch, and thither, at top speed of his scouts, was the young leader pressing. Not even a dull glow in the heavens above, or a spark on the earth beneath, could the sharp-eyed scouts discover to tell of its lonely fate. Only the dago's horrified words, only the confirmative symptoms of these farther fires, had these fly-by-night rescuers to warrant their mission. The story had its probable side. Peaceable as had been the Apache-Mohaves, the fact that a clash had occurred between them and some of the agent's forces,--a clash in which Comes Flying had been killed,--might readily turn the scale and send them on the war-path. If so, the first and nearest whites were apt to be the victims. If so, Bennett and his beloved wife and boys might well have been murdered in their beds--or spared for a harsher fate. In any event, the first duty--the obvious one--for Harris and his scouts was to reach the spot with all speed; ascertain, if possible, the fate of the ranch folk, then act as their discoveries might direct. All this Harris was turning over in mind as he hurried ahead. The road, though little worn, was distinct, and now that they were out of the bottom and skirting the stony bed of a little mountain stream, quite firm and dry. Six miles an hour, easily, his swarthy, half-naked fellows were making without ever "turning a hair." His own lean broncho, long trained to such work, scrambled along in that odd, short-legged trot, and Harris himself, trained to perfection, hard and dry, all sinewy strength, rode easily along--he could have done almost as well afoot--at the head of his men, keeping them to their pace, yet never overdriving.