“We don’t need any Indians to help us get into trouble.  We are sure enough of it without that,” Bill Banney declared.  “And what’s one Indian, anyhow?  She’s just—­”

“Just a little orphan girl like Mat,” Rex Krane finished his sentence.

Bill frowned, but made no reply.

The Indian girl was standing outside the corral, listening to all that was said, her face giving no sign of the struggle between hope and despair that must have striven within her.

“Uncle Esmond, let’s take her, and take our chances.”  Beverly’s boyish voice had a defiant tone, for the spirit of adventure was strong within him.  The girl turned quickly and a great light leaped into her eyes at the boy’s words.

“Save a life and lose ours.  It’s not the rule of the plains, but—­there’s a higher law like that somewhere, Clarenden,” Jondo said, earnestly.

The girl came swiftly toward Uncle Esmond and stood upright before him.

“I will not hide the truth.  I go back to Kiowas.  They sell me for big treasure.  They will not harm you,” she said.  “I stay with you, they say you steal me, and they come at the first bird’s song and kill you every one.  They are so many.”

She stood motionless before him, the seal of grim despair on her young face.

“What’s your name?” Esmond Clarenden asked.  “Po-a-be.  In your words, ‘Little Blue Flower,’” the girl said.

“Then, Little Blue Flower, you must stay with us.”

She pointed toward the eastern sky where a faint light was beginning to show above the horizon.  “See, the day comes!”

“Then we will break camp now,” my uncle said.

“Not in the face of this storm, Clarenden,” Jondo declared.  “You can fight an Indian.  You can’t do a thing but ‘hold fast’ in one of these hurricanes.”

The air was still and hot.  The black cloud swept swiftly onward, with the weird yellow glow before it.  In the solitude of the plains the trail showed like a ghostly pathway of peril.  Before us loomed that grim rock bluff, behind whose crest lay the sleeping band of Kiowas.  It was only because they slept that Little Blue Flower could steal away in hope of rescue.

Hotter grew the air and darker the swiftly rolling clouds; black and awful stood old Pawnee Rock with the silent menace of its sleeping enemy.  In the stillness of the pause before the storm burst we heard Jondo’s voice commanding us.  With our first care for the frightened stock, we grouped ourselves together as he ordered close under the bluff.

Suddenly an angry wind leaped out of the sky, beating back the hot dead air with gigantic flails of fury.  Then the storm broke with tornado rage and cloudburst floods, and in its track terror reigned.  Beverly and I clung together, and, holding a hand of each, Mat Nivers crouched beside us, herself strong in this second test of courage as she had been in the camp that night at Council Grove.