"Very good, sir," said Stannard, and turned on his heel. Mrs. Stannard, hastily kissing Lilian's pale and tear-wet cheek, started to follow, but through the little knots of soldiery a strange figure came forcing a way, a lithe Apache on resentful mule--'Tonio, already back from the front, a little folded paper in his hand. Lashing the obstinate brute he bestrode, 'Tonio dove straight at the general, and all men waited to learn the tidings. Hastily Archer opened the paper, glanced it over in the moonlight, looked up, and nodded to Stannard. "Willett says from round the point they can see two more signal fires toward the north-east, just the way to the Apache Mohaves!" Then came a dramatic incident. Sitting his saddle mule like a chief of the Sioux, 'Tonio straightened to his full height, his strong face gleaming in the brilliant, silvery sheen, his bare right arm, with clinching fist uplifted, and in a voice that rang out like a clarion on the hushed and breathless night, shouted his response for his people: "Apache Mohave! No! _No!_ No!" CHAPTER VI. Barely a mile away to the north-east of the site of old Camp Almy a ridge of rock and shale stretches down from the foothills of the Black Mesa and shuts off all view of the rugged, and ofttimes jagged, landscape beyond--all save the peaks and precipitous cliffs of the Mogollon, and some of the pine-crested heights that hem the East Fork. Time was, toward the fag end of the Civil War, when the volunteers from the "Coast" kept a lookout on the point, a practice that yielded more scalps to the Indians than security to the inmates. The system, therefore, fell into disuse, and the post became unpopular because of the mutilated condition in which the pickets were twice found by the relief, and the amount of reliable information received from the point never quite paid for the cost. With the disappearance of the Tontos, who were not such fools as their Spanish name implied, the practice of stationing outlying sentries was dropped. The Tontos seemed to have abandoned the valley to their distant cousins, the Apache-Mohaves, whose presence there, in small, itinerant parties, was objected to less by the few scattered settlers than by the one badgered agent at the distant reservation.