If only, indeed! was Plume thinking, as eagerly, anxiously he scanned the eastward shore, rising jagged, rocky, and forbidding from the willows of the stream bed. If only, indeed! Not only all this row of which Byrne had seen so much, but all this other row, this row within a row, this intricacy of mishaps and misery that involved the social universe of Camp Sandy, of which as yet the colonel, presumably, knew so very little; of which, as post commander, Plume had yet to tell him! An orderly came running with a field glass and a scrap of paper. Plume glanced at the latter, a pencil scrawl of his wife's inseparable companion, and, for aught he knew, confidante. "Madame," he could make out, and "_affreusement_" something, but it was enough. The orderly supplemented: "Leece, sir, says the lady is very bad--" "Go to her, Plume," with startling promptitude cried the colonel. "I'll look to everything here. It's all coming out right," for with a tantara--tantara-ra-ra Sanders's troop, spreading far and wide, were scrambling up the shaly slopes a thousand yards away. "Go to your wife and tell her the danger's over," and, with hardly another glance at the moaning agent, now being limply hoisted on a hospital stretcher, thankfully the major went. "The lady's very bad, is she?" growled Byrne, in fierce aside to Graham. "That French hag sometimes speaks truth, in spite of herself. How d'you find him?" This with a toss of the head toward the vanishing stretcher. "Bad likewise. These Apache knives dig deep. There's Mullins now--" "Think _that_ was Apache?" glared Byrne, with sudden light in his eyes, for Wren had told his troubles--all. "Apache _knife_--yes." "What the devil do you mean, Graham?" and the veteran soldier, who knew and liked the surgeon, whirled again on him with eyes that looked not like at all. The doctor turned, his somber gaze following the now distant figure of the post commander, struggling painfully up the yielding sand of the steep slope to the plateau. The stretcher bearers and attendants were striding away to hospital with the now unconscious burden. The few men, lingering close at hand, were grouped about the dead Apaches. The gathering watchers along the bank were beyond earshot. Staff officer and surgeon were practically alone and the latter answered: "I mean, sir, that if that Apache knife had been driven in by an Apache warrior, Mullins would have been dead long hours ago--which he isn't." Byrne turned a shade grayer. "Could _she_ have done that?" he asked, with one sideward jerk of his head toward the major's quarters. "I'm not saying," quoth the Scot. "I'm asking was there anyone else?" CHAPTER IX A CARPET KNIGHT, INDEED