In ten minutes
nothing but a heap of glowing beams and embers, within four crumbling
walls of adobe, remained of the "beetle shop." Bugs, butterflies,
books, chests, desk, trunks, furniture, papers, and such martial
paraphernalia as a subaltern might require in that desert land, had
been reduced to ashes before their owner's eyes. He had not saved so
much as a shoe. His watch, lying on the table by his bedside, a silk
handkerchief, and a little scrap of a note, written in girlish hand
and carried temporarily in the breast pocket, were the only items he
had managed to bring with him into the open air. He was still gasping,
gagging, half-strangling, when Captain Cutler accosted him to know if
he could give the faintest explanation of the starting of so strange
and perilous a fire, and Blakely, remembering the stealthy footsteps
and that locked or bolted door, could not but say he believed it
incendiary, yet could think of no possible motive.
It was daybreak as the little group of spectators, women and children
of the garrison, began to break up and return to their homes, all
talking excitedly, all intolerant of the experiences of others, and
centered solely in the narrative of their own. Leaving a dozen men
with buckets, readily filled from the acequia which turned the old
water wheel just across the post of No.
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