It was a little keyhole picture of red and black inferno, while it lasted, but it did not last long. Yet, of General Rosario and his white prisoners there was no trace. That wily leader had gone on with a small escort before nightfall, and no one was left to tell what direction he had taken. So it happened that when the two survivors of the ambuscade came tottering into the camp which they had hoped to reach much sooner, they found the main detachment just leaving. Had it not been belated by the delay of the successful expedition into the hills, it would have passed this point twenty-four hours ago, and the half-dead refugees would have been too late. It had taken Henry Falkins and Newt Spooner two days instead of one to cover that ten miles of _bosque_. They had come staggering, sometimes gibbering, and rarely were both of them sane. Sometimes they raved in duet, but during the first day Newt kicked and pummeled his superior forward as long as he could walk. After that, he carried, dragged and rolled the limp figure, obsessed only by the fixed idea that he had a package to deliver somewhere "over yon." Frequently he forgot that the package was a thing of life. Frequently, too, he madly beat it and swore at it, but always he worked it forward, falling time after time to rise again and stumble ahead. Then Newton Spooner became a thing without consciousness, and a faint spark of realization flickered back into the murk of the major's brain, and laid on his sick soul the same necessity. That day, or part of it, he dragged and carried and kicked. At last, with neither fully conscious, they linked arms about each other's shoulders, gazed at each other with wild, agonized eyes, mumbled at each other with swollen tongues, and shambled, crawled and hitched along together. * * * * * Between two cots in the village at the mountains' edge the wife of Major Falkins vibrated like a pendulum for several days, and when the commanding officer's tongue became again a thing which he could lift and command he told her of his rescue by the boy who had taken a blood-oath against him, but he told nothing of the episode in which the sergeant had debated the fulfilment of his vow. Later, when the company had marched back to its headquarters in the town with the church, Mrs. Falkins drew a glowing picture of heroism in a letter which she wrote home to the States. The colonel, her father, in due time received it, and it found its way into news column and editorial, and was duly read by many persons. "Clem's gal," no longer at the mountain college, but studying at the State University in Lexington with the scholarship that she had won, was one of the many. She read in the little dormitory room overlooking the quiet campus. She had come here to prepare herself for a return to the mountain school as a teacher, and when next she went back to the Cumberlands the paper went with her, that the prophet might have honor at home.