and
in the dust of the track traced the four points of the compass, as he
could still determine them by the sunset light, with a large printed W
to indicate the west! This boyish contrivance particularly pleased him.
If he had only had a pole, a stick, or even a twig, on which to tie his
handkerchief and erect it above the clump of mesquite as a signal to the
searchers in case they should be overcome by fatigue or sleep, he would
have been happy. But the plain was barren of brush or timber; he did
not dream that this omission and the very unobtrusiveness of his
hiding-place would be his salvation from a greater danger.

With the coming darkness the wind arose and swept the plain with a
long-drawn sigh. This increased to a murmur, till presently the whole
expanse--before sunk in awful silence--seemed to awake with vague
complaints, incessant sounds, and low moanings. At times he thought he
heard the halloaing of distant voices, at times it seemed as a whisper
in his own ear. In the silence that followed each blast he fancied he
could detect the creaking of the wagon, the dull thud of the oxen's
hoofs, or broken fragments of speech, blown and scattered even as he
strained his ears to listen by the next gust. This tension of the ear
began to confuse his brain, as his eyes had been previously dazzled by
the sunlight, and a strange torpor began to steal over his faculties.
Once or twice his head dropped.

He awoke with a start. A moving figure had suddenly uplifted itself
between him and the horizon! It was not twenty yards away, so clearly
outlined against the still luminous sky that it seemed even nearer.
A human figure, but so disheveled, so fantastic, and yet so mean and
puerile in its extravagance, that it seemed the outcome of a childish
dream. It was a mounted figure, but so ludicrously disproportionate to
the pony it bestrode, whose slim legs were stiffly buried in the dust in
a breathless halt, that it might have been a straggler from some vulgar
wandering circus. A tall hat, crownless and rimless, a castaway of
civilization, surmounted by a turkey's feather, was on its head; over
its shoulders hung a dirty tattered blanket that scarcely covered the
two painted legs which seemed clothed in soiled yellow hose. In one hand
it held a gun; the other was bent above its eyes in eager scrutiny of
some distant point beyond and east of the spot where the children lay
concealed. Presently, with a dozen quick noiseless strid