He was awakened by a noise, or perhaps it was a touch, he scarcely knew what. He struggled as fiercely and vainly as one who fights against a nightmare. A dark form was over him, a hard knee was on his breast, hard knuckles were at his throat, an arm was raised to strike, a weapon was gleaming.
On the threshold of his enterprise, after he had taken its first hazardous step with safety and success, Coronado found himself at the point of death.
CHAPTER V.
When Coronado regained a portion of the senses which had been throttled out of him, he discovered Texas Smith standing by his side, and two dead men lying near, all rather vaguely seen at first through his dizziness and the moonlight.
"What does this mean?" he gasped, getting on his hands and knees, and then on his feet. "Who has been assassinating?"
The borderer, who, instead of helping his employer to rise, was coolly reloading his rifle, did not immediately reply. As the shaken and somewhat unmanned Coronado looked at him, he was afraid of him. The moonlight made Smith's sallow, disfigured face so much more ghastly than usual, that he had the air of a ghoul or vampyre. And when, after carefully capping his piece, he drawled forth the word "Patchies," his harsh, croaking voice had an unwholesome, unhuman sound, as if it were indeed the utterance of a feeder upon corpses.
"Apaches!" said Coronado. "What! after I had made a treaty with them?"
"This un is a 'Patchie," remarked Texas, giving the nearest body a shove with his boot. "Thar was two of 'em. They knifed one of your men. T'other cleared, he did. I was comin' in afoot. I had a notion of suthin' goin' on, 'n' left the critters out thar, with the rancheros, 'n' stole in. Got in just in time to pop the cuss that had you. T'other un vamosed."
"Oh, the villains!" shrieked Coronado, excited at the thought of his narrow escape. "This is the way they keep their treaties."