s keen
intuitive thoughts appeared more like instincts, than the results of a
process of ratiocination.

That the old trapper admired me--in his own phraseology, "liked me
mightily"--I was aware. He was equally zealous as the younger in my
service; but too free an exhibition of zeal was in his eyes a weakness,
and he endeavoured to conceal it. His admiration of myself was perhaps
owing to the fact that I neither attempted to thwart him in his humours
nor rival him in his peculiar knowledge--the craft of the prairie. In
this I was but his pupil, and behaved as such, generally deferring to
his judgment.

Another impulse acted upon the trackers--sheer love of the part they
were now playing. Just as the hound loves the trail, so did they; and
hunger, thirst, weariness, one or all must be felt to an extreme degree
before they would voluntarily forsake it.

Scarcely staying, therefore, to quench their thirst, they followed me
out of the water; and all three of us together bent our attention to the
sign.

It was a _war-trail_--a true war-trail. There was not the track of a
dog--not the drag of a lodge-pole upon it. Had it been a moving
encampment of peaceable Indians, these signs would have been visible;
moreover, there would have been seen numerous footsteps of Indian
women--of squaws; for the slave-wife of the lordly Comanche is compelled
to traverse the prairies _a pied_, loaded like the packhorse that
follows at her heels!

But though no foot-prints of Indian women appeared, there _were_ tracks
of women, scores of them, plainly imprinted in the soil of the
river-bank. Those slender impressions, scarcely a span in length,
smoothly moulded in the mud, were not to be mistaken for the footsteps
of an Indian squaw. There was not the wide divergence at the heels with
the toes turned inward; neither was there the moccasin-print. No: those
tiny tracks must have been made by women of that nation who possess the
smallest and prettiest feet in the world--by women of Mexico.

"Captives!" we exclaimed, as soon as our eyes rested upon the tracks.

"Ay, poor critters!" said Rube sympathisingly; "the cussed niggurs hev
made 'em fut it, while thur's been spare hosses a plenty. Wagh! a good
wheen o' weemen thur's been--a score on 'em at the least. Wagh! I pity
'em, poor gurls! in sech kumpny as they've got into. It ur a life
they've got to lead. Wagh!"

Rube did not reflect how heavily his words were falling upon my