"At noon we halted for an hour, to rest the horses and eat our slender ration; then on we pushed across the barren wastes toward our destination. At mid-afternoon the heat became terrific, the horses suffering severely and many of them beginning to show evidences of the twelve-hours' stretch. Hanging Rock, fifteen miles away, was now in plain view across the valley, but it began to be questionable whether the command could reach it before dusk, and it would be most imprudent to scale the hill and enter that rocky den after the sun had gone down.
"Nature, in a freakish mood, had pushed the long shelf of rock out from the summit of the divide, and most strange it was that there, high up above the plain, should bubble forth from beneath the hanging scarp of stone, a great spring of clear, cool water. The ridge was a wilderness of giant boulders, a jungle of ragged rocks, thick strewn, as if scattered by some Titan hand in the far-off days when earth was young.
"Suddenly the left flankers, a half mile in advance, drew up, and Reynolds' signal told me that something unusual was beyond. A moment later we saw a single horseman emerge from one of the numerous blind cañons on the left and ride rapidly toward the waiting soldiers. Reaching them he seemed to confer for a moment, then Reynolds wheeled and dashed back toward the column, waving his hat and shouting some unintelligible message. As I rode forward to meet the flying horseman, his white face warned me of evil tidings.
"'Captain, a scout from Fort Grant says that the Colonel's wife and his two little children, with a detail of six men, left Grant at noon, to meet the Colonel at Huachuca; two hours after they left the post, news of the break reached the camp, and Captain Dunlap sent this scout after the Colonel's wife to bring her back. He ran into a band of Apaches who were following the trail of the ambulance, and he thinks they will overtake it at Hanging Rock. Unable to warn the detail, and with another band of Indians between him and Grant, he cut around and was making for Huachuca when he spied us.'
"God! It was fifteen miles to Hanging Rock, and even now the little detail might be surrounded. And a woman, too! It meant swift action; so, turning to the command, I told the men the situation, explaining that the lives of our Colonel's wife and children, and of the six troopers, depended upon our reaching Hanging Rock before the reds could complete their devilish work. As many of the horses were exhausted, it would depend upon those who had the best mounts to make the rescue, so I ordered each man to do his best and started the entire troop upon a free-for-all run for the Rock. Within ten minutes Company C was strung out for a mile across the desert, the better horses forging to the front, the weaker falling to the rear.
