the creek sparkled and rippled musically over a bed of yellow gravel, while the soft lush grass clothing each bank waved gracefully in the light wind, rising and falling like the waves of the sea.  It was all primitive nature untouched, nor was there evidence anywhere within our vision, that this isolated valley in the midst of the prairie, had ever before been visited by man.  No dim trail crossed our path; no appearance of life, human or animal, met our eyes; we forced our own passage onward, with nothing to guide us, feeling more and more deeply the dread loneliness and silence of this strangely desolate paradise.

The rising sun topped the summit of the bluff, its red rays seeming to bridge with spans of gossamer the little valley up which we toiled.  I had lost my interest, and was walking doggedly on, with eyes bent upon the ground, when the girl beside me cried out suddenly, a new excitement in her voice.

“Oh, there is a cabin! see!  Over yonder; just beyond that big oak, where the bluff turns.”

Her eager face was aglow, her outstretched hand pointing eagerly.

The logs of which the little building had been constructed, still in their native bark, blended so perfectly with the drab hillside beyond, that for the moment none of us caught the distant outlines.  Tim possessed the keenest sight, and his voice was first to speak.

“Sure, Miss, thet’s a cabin, all right,” he said grimly.  “One room, an’ new built; likely ‘nough sum settler just com’ in yere.  I don’t see no movement, ner smoke.”

“Fled to the nearest fort probably,” I replied, able myself by this time to decipher the spot.  “Be too risky to stay out here alone.  We’ll look it over; there might be food left behind, even if the people have gone.”

We must have been half an hour in covering the distance.  There were a number of shallow gullies to cross, and a long, gently sloping hill to climb.  The cabin stood well up above the stream, within the shade of the great oak, and we were confirmed, long before we reached it, of our former judgment that it was uninhabited.  The door stood ajar, and the wooden shutter of the single window hung dejectedly by one hinge.  No sign of life was visible about the place; it had the appearance of desertion, no smoke even curling from out the chimney.  A faint trail, evidently little used, led down toward the creek, and we followed this as it wound around the base of the big tree.  Then it was that the truth dawned suddenly upon us—­there to our right lay a dead mule, harnessed for work, but with throat cut; while directly in front of the cabin door was a dog, an ugly, massive brute, his mouth open, prone on his back, with stiffened legs pointing to the sky.  I dropped my rein, and strode forward.

“Wait where you are,” I called back.  “There have been savages here; let me see first what has happened inside.”