"Jimmy!" she cried, between surprise and joy. "But, oh!" she continued, sadly, "I have found you but to lose you again. You must go, quick, before they can send the sheriff or the doctor." "We must part; yes, and perhaps never meet again on earth. But, ere we part, I must give your heart another wound. Your brother--it was I who--" "Murdered him!" shrieked the girl. "Cruiser!" she called, wildly; and the faithful animal, as if knowing the import of the conversation in the room, threw himself with a fierce, yelping bark against the door. "Hold!" and he caught the girl as she sprang to open it. "Hear me out, while I have yet time to speak. It was I who brought him home, so that he might sleep quietly in the church-yard, instead of finding a grave at the bottom of the Bay. Ask Henry who killed him; ask him whether 'Celeste' was worth the blood of the poor boy, and he will not refuse to tell the truth." At the door Cruiser was scratching and whining, accompanying the man's hurried words with a weird, uncanny music; and now he howled again as he had howled on the night of poor Ned's death. "Farewell, Annie; your sister and that dog will soon be the only friends you have. I can neither claim you nor protect you. Farewell; be happy if you can, and--forget me." "Never! never!" sobbed the girl. A hand, softer even than her own, was passed tenderly through her hair and over her brow; a single kiss was breathed on her lips, and the next moment she was alone, the dog, her sole friend, crouching, with every demonstration of devotion and affection, at her feet. _THE TRAGEDY AT MOHAWK STATION._ We called it our noon-camp, though it was really not after ten o'clock in the morning. Ours was the only ambulance in the "outfit," though there were some three or four officers besides the captain. The captain had been ordered to report at head-quarters in San Francisco before going East, and was travelling through Arizona as fast as Uncle Sam's mules could carry him, in order to catch the steamer that was to leave the Pacific coast at the end of the month. It is just a year ago, and the Pacific Railroad was not yet completed; which accounts for the captain's haste to reach the steamer. When we made noon-camp at the Government forage-station called Stanwick's Ranch, we had already performed an ordinary day's march; but we were to accomplish twenty-five miles more before pitching our tent (literally) at Mohawk Station for the night. These "stations" are not settlements, but only stopping-places, where Government teamsters draw forage for their mules, and where water is to be had;--the station-keepers sometimes seeing no one the whole year round except the Government and merchant trains passing along _en route_ to Tucson or other military posts.