“You enter my house, Senor Teniente. You ask for food, for drink. You pay. You go. Ask I you your name--your home? No! Should I demand it of any caballero who so come and go?” And failing in extracting information from the master, Adriance sought the hirelings and found them equally reticent. Shrewd frontiersmen and campaigners in his little detachment were equally unsuccessful until nearly night, when a brace of prospectors rode in and said they saw what looked to be a human body over on a sand bar down the Gila. Then Pedro's face had turned ashen gray, and one of his henchmen trembled violently. Poor Dinsmore was given such soldier burial as his comrades could devise, and Pedro, of his own accord, and with much reverential gravity of mien, had graced the ceremony with his presence. Every man of the cavalry detachment felt morally certain that Pedro Ruiz knew far more than he would tell, but there was no way in which they could proceed farther, and civil process was ineffectual in those days except in the court of final jurisdiction of which Judge Lynch was sole presiding officer. Adriance rode away with a distinct sense of discomfiture at heart. What business had he to feel baffled and chagrined at his failure to see that girl again when the original object of his mission had been the discovery of Dinsmore's fate? What right had he to wish to speak with the daughter of the man whom he believed an accessory to the sergeant's murder? “Do not let them know you have seen me” she had whispered ere she scurried away to the ranch, and as neither mother nor daughter once appeared during the presence of his escort about the corral, there seemed no way in which he could open the subject. Six months passed, during which period he had been sent to Tucson on escort duty, and while there had sought and found some well-to-do Mexican residents whom he remembered as being friends of the graceful girl who had danced so delightfully with him at the _baile_ only the year before. From them he learned her name, Isabel, and something of her history. And the very next scout down the Gila found him in command and eager to go, and this very night, black and forbidding, that had settled down on Rancho Ruiz after the arrival of Paymaster Sherrick and his train, who should come riding noiselessly through the gloaming but Lieutenant Adriance himself, as before, all alone.