he's got inside
his hat the business card o' this gentleman--Mr. Dick Boyle, traveling
for the big firm o' Fletcher & Co. of Chicago"--he interpolated, rising
suddenly to the formal heights of polite introduction; "so it sorter
looks ez ef any SKELPIN' was to be done it might be the other way round,
ha! ha!"

Miss Cantire accepted the introduction and the joke with polite but cool
abstraction, and climbed lightly into the box seat as the mail bags
and a quantity of luggage--evidently belonging to the evading
passengers--were quickly transferred to the coach. But for his fair
companion, the driver would probably have given profane voice to his
conviction that his vehicle was used as a "d----d baggage truck," but
he only smiled grimly, gathered up his reins, and flicked his whip. The
coach plunged forward into the dust, which instantly rose around it, and
made it thereafter a mere cloud in the distance. Some of that dust for
a moment overtook and hid the Indian, walking stolidly in its track,
but he emerged from it at an angle, with a quickened pace and a peculiar
halting trot. Yet that trot was so well sustained that in an hour he had
reached a fringe of rocks and low bushes hitherto invisible through the
irregularities of the apparently level plain, into which he plunged and
disappeared. The dust cloud which indicated the coach--probably owing
to these same irregularities--had long since been lost on the visible
horizon.

The fringe which received him was really the rim of a depression quite
concealed from the surface of the plain,--which it followed for
some miles through a tangled trough-like bottom of low trees and
underbrush,--and was a natural cover for wolves, coyotes, and
occasionally bears, whose half-human footprint might have deceived a
stranger. This did not, however, divert the Indian, who, trotting
still doggedly on, paused only to examine another footprint--much more
frequent--the smooth, inward-toed track of moccasins. The thicket grew
more dense and difficult as he went on, yet he seemed to glide through
its density and darkness--an obscurity that now seemed to be stirred
by other moving objects, dimly seen, and as uncertain and intangible as
sunlit leaves thrilled by the wind, yet bearing a strange resemblance to
human figures! Pressing a few yards further, he himself presently became
a part of this shadowy procession, which on closer scrutiny revealed
itself as a single file of Indians, following eac