"_Adios_, Sancho; _hasta otra vista!_" he had hailed, but his gaze sought the little window in the adobe wall where a pair of dark, languorous eyes peered out from between the parted curtains and a dusky face dodged out of view the instant it saw it was seen. What Sancho said in answer is not recorded, but now he was watching the coming of the stage from Yuma. Some one had warned him Lieutenant Blake would return that way, ordered back to the old post to the north as witness before an important court-martial. Those were later termed "the days of the Empire" in Arizona. Perhaps five thousand souls were counted within its borders at the time our story opens, not counting the soulless Apaches. Arizona had the customary territorial equipment of a governor, certain other officials constituting the cabinet, and a secretary. Nine men out of the dozen Americans in the only approach to a town it then possessed--Tucson--would have said "Damfino" if asked who was the secretary, but all men knew the sheriff. The grave, cigarro-smoking, serape-shrouded caballeros who rode at will through the plaza and ogled dark-eyed maidens peeping from their barred windows, could harbor no interest in the question of who was president of the United States, but the name of the post commander at Grant, Lowell or Crittenden was a household word, and in the eyes of the populace the second lieutenant commanding the paymaster's escort was illimitably "a bigger man" than the thrice distinguished soldier and citizen whose sole monument, up to that time, was the flagstaff at the adobe corral and barracks sacred to his name. Mr. Blake had never been in such a God-forsaken country or community before, but there was something in the utter isolation, the far-stretching waste of shimmering sand, the desolate mountain ranges sharply outlined, hostile and forbidding, the springless, streamless, verdureless plains of this stricken land, that harmonized with the somewhat savage and cynical humor in which he had sought service in the most intolerable clime then open to the troops of Uncle Sam. Blake had been jilted and took it bitterly to heart. Wearing the willow himself, he cherished it as the only green and growing thing in the Gila valley; whereas, had he sought sympathy he would have found other young gentlemen similarly decorated, and therefore as content as he to spend the months or possibly years of their embittered life just as far from the madding crowd and, as Blake cynically put it, "as near hell." Blake was a man of distinction, as relatives went, and those were days when friends at court had more to do with a fellow's sphere of duty--very much more--than had the regimental commander or even the adjutant-general. Blake took Arizona in preference to a tour in the signal office at Washington. He wanted to get as far away from the national capital and the favorite haunt of "the Army and Navy forever" as he possibly could. It was the most natural thing in the world to him