An affectionate embrace and kiss were given to the wife and little one, and then, swinging himself into the saddle, Maurice Freeman pointed the nose of his mustang up the valley, and spurred him to a dead run, with outstretched neck, flying mane and tail and snorting nostrils. As if he understood that he had set out to save human life, he paid no more heed to the blistering heat than did his rider, who closed his mouth hard, as he refilled the empty chambers of his Winchester without drawing rein.
The wooden structure, which was Captain Murray’s home, had been seasoned by the flaming sun for weeks and months, so that when the torch was applied it burned like tinder. Before half the distance was passed by the furious rider, it was a mass of smouldering ruins, from which the smoke still ascended and stained the clear air above.
Freeman now drew rein, for it would have been folly to continue his headlong flight without learning what was in front. He saw nothing of white men or Indians, as he drew still nearer, and rightly suspected that the hostiles, having delivered their blow, were now making for the mountains with all speed.
“And where is the captain?—where is his wife?—where are his children?—and where, heaven tell me! is my own boy?”
It was the last query that wrung his heart with an anguish, such as only a parent can feel, when he believes that a loved child is irrecoverably lost.
“They have gone,” he added, as he made a cautious circle of the smoking ruins, “they have done their work well——”
The most torturing trial of his life was now upon him. When he muttered to himself that the Apaches had done their work well, he meant far more than the burning of the home. That was a trifle compared with the other sight which greeted him while making his awed circuit of the ruins.
He saw the forms stretched on the ground, with their white faces turned toward the brassy sky, and he needed no one to tell him what it meant. There was the father, lying within a dozen steps of the wife, whom he had defended with his last breath, and just beyond, and nearer the doorstep, a little girl lay with one dimpled arm doubled under her cheek, as if she were sleeping. And so she was, but it was the long dreamless slumber which knows no waking in this world.
The sight which caused the heart of the father to stand still was that of the figure of a little boy, still nearer and indeed on the very threshold. His face was turned away, so that he could not see the features, and the clothing was so disarranged that he could not identify it.
At such times suspense is unbearable. Without dismounting he forced his reluctant pony so close to the burning wood that the additional heat checked him. Then he leaned over his saddle, and peered down into the face of the boy, now in plain view.