himself, staying there nearly two hours. A half hour before he left, he
saw distant smoke on his right and then smoke equally distant on his
left. Each smoke was ascending in spiral rings, and he knew that they
were talking together. He knew also that their engrossing topic was his
own smoke rising directly between. A fantastic mood seized him, and he
decided to take a part in the conversation. Passing one of his blankets
back and forth over his own fire, he, too, sent up a series of rings,
sometimes at regular intervals, and again with long breaks between.

It was a weird and drunken chain of signals and he knew that it would
set the Indians on the right and the Indians on the left to wondering.
They would try their best to read his signals, which he could not read
himself; they would strive to put in them meaning, where there was no
meaning at all; and he worked with the blanket and the smoke with as
much zest and zeal as he had shown at any time in his flight for life.

No such complicated signals had ever before been sent up in the
wilderness, and he enjoyed the perplexity of the warriors to the utmost
as he saw them talking to one another and also trying frantically to
talk to him. The more they said, the more he said and the more
complicated was the way in which he said it, until the smoke on his
right and the smoke on his left began to sweep around in gusts of
indignation and disappointment.

His fantastic humor deepened. He sincerely hoped that Blackstaffe was
at the foot of one smoke and that Braxton Wyatt was at the foot of the
other, and the more they were puzzled and vexed the better it suited his
temper. He sent up the most extraordinary spirals of smoke. Sometimes
they rose straight up in the heavens, now they started off to the right,
and then they started off to the left. Although they meant nothing, one
could imagine that they meant anything or everything. They were a
frantic call for help or an insistent message that the trail of the
fugitive had been discovered, or merely a wild statement that the night
was not going to be cold, nor the next day either, or an exchange of
compliments, or whatever those who saw the things chose to imagine.

After hoping for a while so intensely that Braxton Wyatt and Blackstaffe
were on either side of him, Henry felt sure it was true, so ready is
eager hope to turn its belief into a fact, and he rejoiced anew at their
vexation, laughing silently and long. Then he ab