The Big Dry. George Garland

barked and bullets whined, spat hard against trees and rocks and died. Then Reeder’s crisp voice, rattling off orders expertly from unexcited lips, cried out, “Through my forearm!”

      Troop A waited for the big attack, taut, sharp-eyed, staring into the darkness over rifles, Reeder obliquely off the south road, Dana on the north, nobody in the blacked-out camp. Troop A continued to wait. Waited for nothing.

      And Lieutenant Dana thinking over and over again: “Five arrows: The mark of Victorio!” Thinking also: “It’s not like the Apache. All arrows came from the same direction, from one bow, perhaps. And at night. It isn’t the Apache way.”

      There was little sleep in camp that night. The troop was on the move before dawn, with three dead men in the paymaster’s ambulance. On the column plodded, a grim, scared bunch of troopers who were wishing the dawn would not slide up in the morning sky that day. The dawn belonged to the Apache.

      Lieutenant Dana felt the onus of command. Every name on the roll and horse book was his responsibility. Three men were dead. That added up. The night attack didn’t. But together they were the two and two that made four. Even now Chaves was riding hard for Fort Bayard with the news.

      And Dana was not a man to discount plain facts. He knew that, as sure as he was alive at the moment, the mark of Victorio had fallen like a dark cloud over the thin strip of civilization in the morning shadows of the Mogollons.