otioned shyly towards the cabin, and then led the way. The
stranger, with an inarticulate murmur, afterwards disguised as a cough,
followed her meekly. Nevertheless, by the time they had reached the
cabin he had shaken his long hair over his eyes again, and a dark
abstraction gathered chiefly in his eyebrows. But it did not efface from
the girl's mind the previous concession of a blush, and, although it
added to her curiosity, did not alarm her. He drank the milk awkwardly.
But by the laws of courtesy, even among the most savage tribes, she
felt he was, at that moment at least, harmless. A timid smile fluttered
around her mouth as she said:--

"When ye hung up them things I thought ye might be havin' suthing to
swap or sell. That is,"--with tactful politeness,--"mother was wantin'
a new skillet, and it would have been handy if you'd had one. But"--with
an apologetic glance at his equipments--"if it ain't your business, it's
all right, and no offense."

"I've got a lot o' skillets," said the strange teamster, with marked
condescension, "and she can have one. They're all that's left outer a
heap o' trader's stuff captured by Injuns t'other side of Laramie. We
had a big fight to get 'em back. Lost two of our best men,--scalped at
Bloody Creek,--and had to drop a dozen redskins in their tracks,--me and
another man,--lyin' flat in er wagon and firin' under the flaps o'
the canvas. I don't know ez they waz wuth it," he added in gloomy
retrospect; "but I've got to get rid of 'em, I reckon, somehow, afore I
work over to Deadman's Gulch again."

The young girl's eyes brightened timidly with a feminine mingling of
imaginative awe and personal, pitying interest. He was, after all, so
young and amiable looking for such hardships and adventures. And with
all this, he--this Indian fighter--was a little afraid of HER!

"Then that's why you carry that knife and six-shooter?" she said. "But
you won't want 'em now, here in the settlement."

"That's ez mebbe," said the stranger darkly. He paused, and then
suddenly, as if recklessly accepting a dangerous risk, unbuckled his
revolver and handed it abstractedly to the young girl. But the sheath
of the bowie-knife was a fixture in his body-belt, and he was obliged
to withdraw the glittering blade by itself, and to hand it to her in all
its naked terrors. The young girl received the weapons with a smiling
complacency. Upon such altars as these the skeptical reader will
remember that Mars