to your ranch-land. Do you hear me, or
is it that you have changed your mind like all women and do not now wish
to go?"

Olive laughed. It was so funny to hear this small boy take the
patronizing tone with her that the men of his race used toward all
women. She put her arm about him and drew him down on the floor by her.
The flickering lights of the fire played on the two dark heads, her hair
fine and soft as silk, his stiff and straight as a young colt's mane.

"Of course I want to go back to my friends, Little Brother," Olive
sighed. "But let's don't talk of that to-night, I want to be a little
bit happy in thinking that I have found something that must once have
belonged to my mother."

But the boy would not be persuaded. "We must talk of your getting away
to-night, for the time is ready," Carlos declared, in the solemn tone of
a young Indian chief making ready for battle. "You know I have been out
on the prairies for many days together and no one knew where or for what
I had gone. I have wandered in many directions seeking for the home of
some white man, for I know that however much the Indian pretends he is
in a wilderness, he is always to-day on the border of the white man's
land."

"Well, have you found a friend to help me?" Olive demanded fervently.

"I have found no friend," Carlos replied, refusing to be hurried or
disturbed. "But I have found an iron trail that stretches across the
desert. It must bring you to where the white people dwell."

"An iron trail," Olive repeated wonderingly. "I am afraid I don't know
what you mean."

The boy gazed at her with slow, unmoved patience. "It has an iron
carriage on it that flies along the trail more swiftly than any horse
can run," Carlos explained. "There is great heat and noise and smoke
like a prairie fire."

Olive caught the boy's hand in hers. "You mean an engine and a railroad
track, don't you, Little Brother?" she queried. "You have seen a train
somewhere out on the desert. You will take me to it and somehow I will
find people to help me to get back to Rainbow Lodge." Olive flung her
arms about Carlos and hugged him as she might have hugged Frieda. She
poured out such a flood of questions, that the boy was convinced he was
right in his scorn of her sex, but he listened with deep gravity.

"I do not know all things," he replied finally. "Only I have laid all
day on the ground near the trail. I know the hour when the iron carriage
passes over it. The wal