For answer Byrne wired that a detachment of a dozen men with three packers had marched at five o'clock to report to Blakely for such duty as he might require, and the answer came within the minute:
Blakely gone. Started for Snow Lake 4.30. Left orders detachment follow. Took orderly and two Apache Yuma scouts.
Byrne, Cutler, and Graham read with grave and anxious faces, but said very little. It was Blakely's way.
And that was the last heard of the Bugologist for as much as a week.
Meantime there was a painful situation at Fort Whipple, away up in "the hills." Major Plume, eager on his wife's account to get her to the seashore—"Monterey or Santa Barbara," said the sapient medical director—and ceaselessly importuned by her and viciously nagged by Elise, found himself bound to the spot. So long as Mullins stuck to his story Plume knew it would never do for him to leave. "A day or two more and he may abate or amend his statement," wrote Graham. Indeed, if Norah Shaughnessy were not there to prompt—to prop—his memory, Graham thought it like enough that even now the soldier would have wavered. But never a jot or tittle had Mullins been shaken from the original statement.
"There was two women," he said, "wid their shawls over their heads," and those two, refusing to halt at his demand, had been overtaken and one of them seized, to his bitter cost, for the other had driven a keen-bladed knife through his ribs, even as he sought to examine his captive. "They wouldn't spake," said he, "so what could I do but pull the shawl from the face of her to see could she be recognized?" Then came the fierce, cat-like spring of the taller of the two. Then the well-nigh fatal thrust. What afterwards became of the women he could say no more than the dead. Norah might rave about its being the Frenchwoman that did it to protect the major's lady—this he spoke in whispered confidence and only in reply to direct question—but it wouldn't be for the likes of him to preshume. Mullins, it seems, was a soldier of the old school.
Then came fresh and dire anxiety at Sandy. Four days after Blakely's start there appeared two swarthy runners from the way of Beaver Creek. They bore a missive scrawled on the paper lining of a cracker box, and it read about as follows:
Camp in Sunset Pass, November 3d.
Commanding Officer, Camp Sandy:
Scouting parties returning find no trace of Captain Wren and Sergeant Carmody, but we shall persevere. Indians lurking all about us make it difficult. Shall be needing rations in four days. All wounded except Flynn doing fairly well. Hope couriers sent you on 30th and 31st reached you safely.