“So soon!”
“Yes, sir—I reckon if everything goes right Bob Somers and I will start for Mexico this very afternoon.”
The lad walked briskly outside, to find Blimby already in the saddle.
Colonel Sylvester’s face wore a much disturbed expression when, not many minutes afterward, he warmly shook Tom Clifton’s hand, spoke a few words of adieu to him and the cowboy, and watched both galloping off side by side.
“A brave, daring young chap!” he murmured. “But I almost wish now I hadn’t consented to the lad’s going on an errand where there is a possibility of his being exposed to so much danger.”
CHAPTER XX
UNDER FIRE
At four o’clock on the following morning the little frontier town in Mexico began to be the theater of some exciting events.
A Constitutionalist cavalry force, numbering several thousand, under cover of darkness had formed a ring of steel to the west and south. And while the inhabitants, lulled to a sense of security and indifference by the long delay, slept on in peace, the artillery got into action.
The siege was on.
The rattle and boom of machine and field guns in the dreamy silence of the morning made a din which probably aroused every one in town.