He pulled Spraddle down to a walk, and looked about him.  Behind him there was no trace of the cow camp, nothing but the everlasting rise and fall of the prairie.

But ahead was the ragged line of the blue mountains.  These he knew to be the Wichita Mountains, for, although he had never seen them before, he had heard the boys talking about them in camp.

Then he saw the coyote on a hill a little ways ahead, looking at him in the most aggravating way.  The coyote’s lips were curled back from his teeth in a contemptuous sort of a smile, it seemed to Dick, and as he started forward again the coyote threw up its head and actually laughed at him.

That settled it with Dick.  No coyote that ever trotted the plains could laugh at him, but as this thought came to him he felt the dread of being lost on the prairie, or even having to stay alone in this waste all night.

Dick had heard the boys talk of the danger of being alone at night, for there were wolves and other animals that would daunt a man, to say nothing of a small boy.

He thought he would follow the coyote only long enough to get another shot at him, and then retrace his way back to the camp.  By putting Spraddle through his paces he ought to be able to reach it before dark.

So he set forth again in the wake of the coyote, which was becoming more and more aggravating every minute.  Suddenly the coyote disappeared altogether.  It had done this before when it had gone down into the trough between two of the great, rolling swales of the prairie, but always it had come into sight again in a few minutes.

This time, however, it did not, and Dick wondered why.

In a few minutes he understood why, for he found himself at the edge of a coulee which had been washed deep by the storms of many winters.

Dick looked up and down the coulee for the wolf, and saw a form, gray and lithe, slinking among the bowlders with which it was filled.  Dick forced Spraddle down the steep bank of the coulee, and was soon at the bottom.

Hastily he set after the coyote, but suddenly stopped, for a man stepped from behind a shoulder of rock and clay and caught his bridle.

Spraddle stopped so quickly that Dick was almost unseated.  But he soon recovered himself, and stared in amazement at the man who had thus stopped him.

He was an Indian.

Dick had often seen Indians in the towns through which the broncho boys had passed, and occasionally they had come into the camps they had established on the drive of the herd up from Texas.

But this was the first time Dick had ever come in contact with an Indian when he was alone.  For a moment his heart stopped beating, for he was afraid.

“How?” grunted the Indian.

It was all Dick could do to reply with a feeble, quavering “How?”

Many times around the camp fire, with the boys all about, when Bud was telling one of his tales of Indians, Dick had thought what he would do if he ever came in contact with a real, live, sure-enough redskin, and always he had thought how brave he would be.  But now that he had actually met one, he felt his nerve ooze away.