“Good-morning, Mr. Foster,” she said, with a smile.

“Mornin’, miss.  I hear they’re havin’ an Injin scare over at the Barrens.  I reckon them men must feel mighty mean at bein’ stumped by a lady!”

“I don’t think they believed I would go, and some of them had their wives with them,” returned the young lady indifferently; “besides, they are Eastern people, who don’t know Indians as well as we do, Mr. Foster.”

The driver blushed with pleasure at the association.  “Yes, ma’am,” he laughed, “I reckon the sight of even old ‘Fleas in the Blanket’ over there,” pointing to the Indian, who was walking stolidly away from the station, “would frighten ’em out o’ their boots.  And yet he’s got inside his hat the business card o’ this gentleman—­Mr. Dick Boyle, traveling for the big firm o’ Fletcher & Co. of Chicago”—­he interpolated, rising suddenly to the formal heights of polite introduction; “so it sorter looks ez ef any SKELPIN’ was to be done it might be the other way round, ha! ha!”

Miss Cantire accepted the introduction and the joke with polite but cool abstraction, and climbed lightly into the box seat as the mail bags and a quantity of luggage—­evidently belonging to the evading passengers—­were quickly transferred to the coach.  But for his fair companion, the driver would probably have given profane voice to his conviction that his vehicle was used as a “d——­d baggage truck,” but he only smiled grimly, gathered up his reins, and flicked his whip.  The coach plunged forward into the dust, which instantly rose around it, and made it thereafter a mere cloud in the distance.  Some of that dust for a moment overtook and hid the Indian, walking stolidly in its track, but he emerged from it at an angle, with a quickened pace and a peculiar halting trot.  Yet that trot was so well sustained that in an hour he had reached a fringe of rocks and low bushes hitherto invisible through the irregularities of the apparently level plain, into which he plunged and disappeared.  The dust cloud which indicated the coach—­probably owing to these same irregularities—­had long since been lost on the visible horizon.

The fringe which received him was really the rim of a depression quite concealed from the surface of the plain,—­which it followed for some miles through a tangled trough-like bottom of low trees and underbrush,—­and was a natural cover for wolves, coyotes, and occasionally bears, whose half-human footprint might have deceived a stranger.  This did not, however, divert the Indian, who, trotting still doggedly on, paused only to examine another footprint—­much more frequent—­the smooth, inward-toed track of moccasins.  The thicket grew more dense and difficult as he went on, yet he seemed to glide through its density and darkness—­an obscurity that now seemed to be stirred by other moving objects, dimly seen, and as uncertain and intangible as sunlit leaves thrilled by the wind, yet bearing a strange