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And all this, said Byrne, between his set teeth, because a bumptious agent sought to lay forceful hands upon the daughter of a chief. Poor Daly! He had paid dearly for that essay. As for Natzie, and her shadow Lola, neither one had been again seen. They might indeed have dropped back from Montezuma Well after the first wild stampede, but only fruitless search had the soldiers made for them.
At his low whisper, "Natzie," she sprang to her feet without word or sound; seized the thin white hand tremulously extended toward her, and, pillowing her cheek upon it, knelt humbly by the bedside, her black hair streaming to the floor.
Natzie eagerly gesticulated, exclaiming, "Apaches, Apaches," and pointing ahead up the trail, and, though she could speak no English, convincing Angela that she was in desperate danger.
The flicker of strength that came to him for a second or two at sight of the tragedy, left him as suddenly left him feebler than before. He had no voice with which to protest when the stretchermen, who bore away poor Todd, were followed instantly by stout guardsmen who bore away Natzie. The dignity of the chieftain's daughter had vanished now.
Even the latest punctured patient at the hospital, Private Todd, had to serve as evidence in behalf of Elise, for Graham, post surgeon, had calmly declared that the same weapon that so nearly killed Pat Mullins had as nearly and neatly done the deed for Todd the keen Apache knife of Princess Natzie.
That night Natzie had done her best to find her way to Blakely with the property, and the rest they knew. The watch was dropped in the struggle on the mesa when Mullins was stabbed, the picture-case that morning at the major's quarters. "Was it Blakely told you all this, sir?" Wren had asked, still wrong-headed and suspicious. "No, Wren. It was I told Blakely.
Half a dozen little nomad bands, forever out from the reservation, had eagerly welcomed these malcontents and the news they bore that two of their young braves had been murdered while striving to defend Natzie and Lola.
To the surprise of Aunt Janet she heard her without interruption to the uttermost word, and then wished to know if Aunt Janet thought the major would let her send Natzie something for supper. Whatever the girl may have thought of this new and possible complication, she determined that no soul should read that it cost her a pang. She declined to discuss it.
The picture, she said, stood often on his little camp table. Every Indian who entered his tent knew it and saw it. Why, surely; Natzie, too, mused the major, and then aloud: "I can see now what we have all been puzzling over. Angela Wren might well have looked like this four years ago." "There is not the faintest resemblance," said Clarice, promptly rising and quitting the room.
Angela and her benefactors, too, would probably have been the victims of their captors. Natzie could look for no mercy from them now. Through Wales Arnold, the captain and his men had little by little learned the story of Natzie's devotion.
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