n of a pup, eh?"

"You bet," they responded.

The voice was not unkindly, although the speaker had thrown his lower
jaw forward as if to pronounce the word "pup" with a humorous suggestion
of a mastiff. Before Clarence could make up his mind if the epithet
was insulting or not, the man put out his stirruped foot, and, with a
gesture of invitation, said, "Jump up."

"But Susy," said Clarence, drawing back.

"Look; she's making up to Phil already."

Clarence looked. Susy had crawled out of the mesquite, and with her
sun-bonnet hanging down her back, her curls tossed around her face,
still flushed with sleep, and Clarence's jacket over her shoulders, was
gazing up with grave satisfaction in the laughing eyes of one of the men
who was with outstretched hands bending over her. Could he believe his
senses? The terror-stricken, willful, unmanageable Susy, whom he would
have translated unconsciously to safety without this terrible ordeal of
being awakened to the loss of her home and parents at any sacrifice
to himself--this ingenuous infant was absolutely throwing herself with
every appearance of forgetfulness into the arms of the first new-comer!
Yet his perception of this fact was accompanied by no sense of
ingratitude. For her sake he felt relieved, and with a boyish smile
of satisfaction and encouragement vaulted into the saddle before the
stranger.

CHAPTER IV

The dash forward to the train, securely held in the saddle by the arms
of their deliverers, was a secret joy to the children that seemed only
too quickly over. The resistless gallop of the fiery mustangs, the rush
of the night wind, the gathering darkness in which the distant wagons,
now halted and facing them, looked like domed huts in the horizon--all
these seemed but a delightful and fitting climax to the events of the
day. In the sublime forgetfulness of youth, all they had gone through
had left no embarrassing record behind it; they were willing to repeat
their experiences on the morrow, confident of some equally happy end.
And when Clarence, timidly reaching his hand towards the horse-hair
reins lightly held by his companion, had them playfully yielded up to
him by that hold and confident rider, the boy felt himself indeed a man.

But a greater surprise was in store for them. As they neared the wagons,
now formed into a circle with a certain degree of military formality,
they could see that the appointments of the strange party were larger
an