Those suitcases were enough to make any man sit and bite his nails, wondering if he were crazy.  Fred and Art had evidently fitted their wardrobe to their ideas of a summer camp with dancing pavilion and plenty of hammocks in the immediate neighborhood.  There were white flannel trousers and white canvas shoes and white silk socks, and fine ties and handkerchiefs and things.  There were striped silk shirts which made Casey grin and think how tickled Injun Jim would be with them,—­or one or two of them; Casey had no intention of laying them all on the altar of diplomacy.  There was an assortment of apparel in those suitcases that would qualify any man as porch hound at Del Monte.  And Casey Ryan, if you please, had fallen heir to the lot!

He dressed himself in white flannels with a silk shirt of delf blue and pale green stripes, and wished that there was a looking-glass in camp large enough to reflect all of him at once.  Then, because his beard stubble did not harmonize, he shaved with one of the safety razors he found.

After that he sorted and packed a careful wardrobe, and stored strange food into two canvas kyacks.  And the next evening he tied the tent flaps carefully and fared forth with William to find the camp of Injun Jim and see if his dream would come true.

CHAPTER XVI

You may not believe this next incident.  I know I did not, when Casey told me about it,—­but now I am not so sure.  Casey said that the light appeared again, that night, moving slowly along the lip of the canyon like a man with a large lantern.  There was a full moon, which had made him decide to travel at night on account of the heat while the sun was up.  But the moon did not reveal the cause of the light, though the canyon crest was plainly visible to him.

William swung away from that light and walked rather briskly in the other direction, and Casey did not argue with him.  So they headed almost due west and kept going.  It seemed to Casey once or twice that the light followed them; but he could not be sure.

Two full nights he journeyed, and on both nights he had the light behind him.  Once it came up swiftly to within a mile or so of him and William, and stopped there for awhile and then disappeared.  Casey camped rather early and slept, and took the trail again in the morning.  Night travel was getting on his nerves.

All that day he walked and toward evening, with thunder heads piling high above the Tippipahs, he came upon a small herd of Indian ponies feeding out from the mouth of a wide gulch.  He knew they were Indian ponies by their size, their variegated colors, and their general unkemptness.  They presently spied him and went galloping off up the gulch, and Casey followed until he spied a thin bluish ribbon of smoke wavering up toward the slate-black clouds.