At the door Cruiser was scratching and whining, accompanying the man's hurried words with a weird, uncanny music; and now he howled again as he had howled on the night of poor Ned's death.
"Farewell, Annie; your sister and that dog will soon be the only friends you have. I can neither claim you nor protect you. Farewell; be happy if you can, and—forget me."
"Never! never!" sobbed the girl.
A hand, softer even than her own, was passed tenderly through her hair and over her brow; a single kiss was breathed on her lips, and the next moment she was alone, the dog, her sole friend, crouching, with every demonstration of devotion and affection, at her feet.
THE TRAGEDY AT MOHAWK STATION.
We called it our noon-camp, though it was really not after ten o'clock in the morning. Ours was the only ambulance in the "outfit," though there were some three or four officers besides the captain. The captain had been ordered to report at head-quarters in San Francisco before going East, and was travelling through Arizona as fast as Uncle Sam's mules could carry him, in order to catch the steamer that was to leave the Pacific coast at the end of the month. It is just a year ago, and the Pacific Railroad was not yet completed; which accounts for the captain's haste to reach the steamer.
When we made noon-camp at the Government forage-station called Stanwick's Ranch, we had already performed an ordinary day's march; but we were to accomplish twenty-five miles more before pitching our tent (literally) at Mohawk Station for the night. These "stations" are not settlements, but only stopping-places, where Government teamsters draw forage for their mules, and where water is to be had;—the station-keepers sometimes seeing no one the whole year round except the Government and merchant trains passing along en route to Tucson or other military posts.
Lunch had been despatched, and I was lounging, with a book in my hand, on the seat of the ambulance,—one of those uncomfortable affairs called "dead-carts," with two seats running the entire length of the vehicle,—when the captain put his head in to say that there was an American woman at the station. White representatives of my sex are "few and far between" in Arizona, and I had made up my mind to go into the house and speak to this one, even before the captain had added: