A Wounded Name

A Wounded Name, by Charles
King

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Title: A Wounded Name
Author: Charles King
Release Date: May 7, 2007 [EBook #21345]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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WOUNDED NAME ***

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A WOUNDED NAME
BY

CAPTAIN CHARLES KING U.S.A.
[Illustration: CAPT. CHARLES KING]
AUTHOR OF
"Warrior Gap," "An Army Wife," "Fort Frayne," "A Garrison Tangle,"
"Noble Blood and a West Point Parallel," "Trumpeter Fred," etc.
"Poor wounded name! My bosom as a bed Shall lodge thee, till thy
wound be throughly healed."
--Two Gentlemen of Verona
F. TENNYSON NEELY, PUBLISHER, LONDON. NEW YORK.
Copyrighted, 1898.
by
F. TENNYSON NEELY
In the United States and Great Britain
(All rights reserved)
* * * * *

A WOUNDED NAME.
CHAPTER I.
The stage coach was invisible in a cloud of its own dust as it lurched
and rolled along the alkali flats down the valley, and Sancho, the
ranch-keeper, could not make out whether any passengers were on top
or not. He had brought a fine binocular to bear just as soon as the shrill
voice of Pedro, a swarthy little scamp of a half-breed, announced the

dust-cloud sailing over the clump of willows below the bend. Pedro
was not the youngster's original name, and so far as could be
determined by ecclesiastical records, owing to the omission of the
customary church ceremonies, he bore none that the chaplain at old
Camp Cooke would admit to be Christian. Itinerant prospectors and
occasional soldiers, however, had suggested a change from the original,
or aboriginal, title which was heathenish in the last degree, to the much
briefer one of Pedro, as fitting accompaniment to that of the illustrious
head of the establishment, and Lieutenant Blake, an infantry sub with
cavalry aspirations which had led him to seek arduous duties in this
arid land, had comprehensively damned the pretensions of the place to
being a "dinner ranch," by declaring that a shop that held Sancho and
Pedro and didn't have game was unworthy of patronage. Sancho had
additional reasons for disapproving of Blake. That fine binocular, to
begin with, bore the brand of Uncle Sam, for which reason it was never
in evidence when an officer or soldier happened along. It had been
abstracted from Blake's signal kit, when he was scouting the Dragoon
Mountains, and swapped for the vilest liquor under the sun, at Sancho's,
of course, and the value of the glass, not of the whisky, was stopped
against the long lieutenant's pay, leaving him, as he ruefully put it,
"short enough at the end of the month." Somebody told Blake he would
find his binocular at Sancho's, and Blake instituted inquiries after his
own peculiar fashion the very next time he happened along that way.
"Here, you Castilian castaway," said he, as he alighted at Sancho's door,
"I am told you have stolen property in the shape of my signal glass.
Hand it over instanter!"
And Sancho, bowing with the grace of a grandee of Spain, had assured
the Señor Teniente that everything within his gates was at his service,
without money and without price, had promptly fetched from an
adjoining room a battered old double-barreled lorgnette, that looked as
though it might have been dropped in the desert by Kearny or
Fauntleroy, or some of the dragoons who made the burning march
before the Gadsden purchase of 1853 made us possessors of more
desert sand and desolate range than we have ever known what to do
with.

"This thing came out of the ark," said Blake, rightfully wrathful. "What
I want is the signal glass that deserter sold you for whisky last
Christmas."
Whereat Sancho called on all the saints in the Spanish calendar to bear
witness to his innocence, and bade the teniente search the premises.
"He's got it in that bedroom yonder," whispered old Sergeant Feeney,
"and I know it, sir."
And Blake, striding to the door in response to the half-challenge,
half-invitation of the gravely courteous cutthroat owner, stopped short
at the threshold, stared, whipped off his scouting hat, and, bowing low,
said: "I beg your pardon, señora, señorita; I did not know--" and retired
in much disorder.
"Why didn't you tell me your family had come, you disreputable old
rip?" demanded he, two minutes later, "or is that too--stolen property?"
"It is the wife of my brother and his daughter," responded the ranchman