THE Missourian and Jim camped on the edge of the timber. So little of the day was remaining to them after they left the hill that they had been forced to stop here; but they were in the saddle again with the first pale glimmer of light that shot across the plain.

“We'll tuck along out of heah in pretty considerable of a hurry, Jim,” said the Missourian.

They crossed the narrow bottom and entered the mountains; but before these quite closed about them, moved by common impulse, they turned for a last look at the hill.

“I certainly am proud to see the end of that!” observed the Missourian as he faced ahead once more.

“You bet I wouldn't care to loaf around there none; most any place'd suit me better,” and Jim took a long, deep breath.

“I tell you, Mr. Orphan, daylight's a thundering fine thing, and I'm going to hanker for it for twenty-four hours at a stretch from now on for right smart of a spell. What sleep I took last night I took in jerks; and what, between seeing Indians and finding dead men, there was no manner of comfort in it.”

“I was some that way myself,” admitted Jim.

“But there's a thing or two I can't just understand, Jim; there wasn't so much as the broken haft of an arrow anywhere about that hill; and a many of them hosses was shod all round.”

“What do you think?” asked Jim.

“Well, I reckon I don't think—I'm plumb beat.”

“I'd like mighty well to have learned who they was, and where they came from. I reckon they got friends and kin back in the States who wouldn't mind hearing what had become of them,” said Jim.

“I guess there's no use our figuring on finding that out; it's annoying, but it can't be helped,” and the Missourian shook his head with an air of settled conviction; “I done my best; I went through 'em for papers or letters; but you seen there was nary the scratch of a pen.”

“I had a brother once,” began Jim, with an air of reminiscent melancholy, “George was his name; and he was some older than me. He went like that; leastways he just sort of never came back to explain what was keeping him. He crossed the Mississippi to hunt and never showed up any more. We 'lowed after a time the Indians had got him all right; and when folks would come round the place asking if we'd heard anything new about George, it was powerful distressing to mother; she'd a sort of special fancy for George.”

After this they continued in silence for a little time, and then, as usual, it was the Missourian who renewed the conversation.

“Who do you reckon had a leg over them shod hosses, Jim?” he asked.

“I ain't the least idea in the world, unless it was redskins,” Jim responded.

“I guess you're right, maybe. It must have been redskins.” Yet it was plain that he was not satisfied, for again and again as the morning advanced he returned to the subject. Finally, however, he seemed to weary of fruitless theorizing, for he drew the map with which the trapper at Fort Bridger had furnished him, from his pocket, and fell to studying it.

“He was a right clever cuss, Jim—we've covered each day just about the distances he said we would; I've marked 'em all off. At this rate about four days more will fetch us out at Raymond's ranch on the bench above Salt Lake; that's the first Mormon settlement we strike. He was sort of sour on Mormons in general, but he spoke well of this heah Raymond.”

The contemplation of the map, and the prospect of so soon reaching the valley had a noticeably cheering effect on him; he began to sing, and the song was a classic of the trail.

“Oberdier, he dreampt a dream,

Dreampt he was drivin' a ten mule team,

But when he woke, he heaved a sigh,

The lead mule kicked out the swing mule's eye.”

But he got no further than the end of the first verse when the words suddenly died on his lips; he reined in his mule and turned to Jim.

“We seem to have found their trail, and they seem to be going in toward the valley; do you see that?” he said.

“I noticed,” answered Jim laconically.

The Missourian dismounted and examined the signs which had compelled his attention. His examination was brief, however, and when he settled himself in the saddle again, he said quietly:

“It's them all right. You and me's got company ahead of us, Jim.”

“They got plenty start of us,” said Jim, moving restlessly in his saddle.

“That's so, these signs are all of a week old. We dassent take any chances trying to find another road into the valley.”

“Scarcely,” said Jim, with a vague, uneasy smile.

An hour later they came upon a spot where the party preceding them had evidently camped, for the ground was trampled and bare where their horses had been picketed. Here, too, were a variety of bulky articles of comparatively small value.

“They seem to have been getting shut of a good deal of their stuff heah,” was the Missourian's comment.

“We know how that goes,” said Jim.

“I reckon they was sort of dividing up their plunder, and chucked out what they didn't think worth toting farther; for you see this couldn't well have been a night camp. I 'low they must have halted heah about midday. You notice their hosses was picketed close, not turned out to graze; if it had been a night camp, a party this size would have let their stock range, because there was plenty of them to herd it through the night.”

From this point on, for perhaps a mile, the signs were quite plain, and then the party appeared to have broken up; one well-marked trail led off to the south; another kept on toward the west; but presently this, too, turned into a branching pass and was lost.

“Humph!” said the Missourian. “Those was mostly the shod hosses; pretty singular, ain't it?”

But it was evident that both he and Jim experienced a sense of positive relief.

All that morning they had toiled through the mountains; but toward the middle of the afternoon they emerged upon a high ridge; here there was good grass and a scattering growth of small timber. They crossed the ridge and descending found themselves in a fertile, well-watered valley.

“We'll camp heah,” said the Missourian, with a sweeping gesture. “Yonder, by that thicket—a stream heads there.”

As they neared the spot he had designated, Jim, who was riding a pace or two in advance and to his right, all at once swung around his long rifle. But the Missourian threw up his hand in protest.

“Don't shoot, Jim!” he called, urging his mule into a shuffling trot.

There was the sound of a stealthy, guarded movement in the tangled undergrowth they were approaching. Jim, whose sense of sight and hearing were strained to the utmost, heard a dead branch snap loudly, and then he saw a small, vague object appear on the opposite side of the thicket, and run limping away. His nerves were quite shattered by the events of the previous day, but here was something tangible, something at which to shoot, and, in his present frame of mind, the mere noise of his gun in that sombre solitude would have been a consolation; but the Missourian's ear caught the ominous click of the lock as he drew back the hammer.

“Don't shoot, you blame fool!” he called again as he crashed through the thicket in pursuit of the fleeing object. The race was a short one, and through an opening in the brush Jim saw his friend rein in his mule suddenly with a savage jerk, and swing himself from his saddle; at the same instant he heard him say:

“There, son, I ain't going to hurt you.”

An instant later Jim broke through the intervening thicket himself, and to his astonishment found the Missourian bending above the prostrate figure of a child.

“He tripped up and fell, he was powerful keen to get away,” explained the Missourian. “I might have hollered at him and saved him the tumble,” he added regretfully.

The boy was lying prone on his back on the ground, gazing up at the two men. Bewilderment, doubt, and fear were mingled in his glance. He did not speak.

“And you wanted to shoot the little cuss, Jim,” he was mildly resentful. “You're always in such a sweat to use that gun of your's, seems like you'll not be content until you plug some one with it.”

Jim merely looked at the child. He saw that he was wretched enough; that his face and hands were torn and bruised, while his clothes were a fluttering mass of unpicturesque rags. The man's mouth opened in silent wonder.

“I certainly am mighty glad we found him,” said the Missourian; and at these words a look of keen suspicion flashed in the child's eyes. Then they had been hunting for him! That was what the man meant!

“Look at him, Jim,” continued the Missourian, all of whose emotions were easily translatable into words. “If he ain't most starved to death I certainly don't know what starving is! He's all skin and bones—what you had to eat, son?”

The child struggled to his feet with difficulty; he was, evidently, very weak, for he shivered and trembled as he stood there. The Missourian put out a staying hand.

“There was things growing on the bushes—I ate them,” he said in a hoarse whisper, begotten of hunger, fatigue, and exposure.

“Wild plums I reckon you mean. Well, sir, me and my pardner here will fill your pinched little carcass full of bread and bacon. Wild plums! Hell! and him a growing child.”

“Where's your folks?” Jim now asked, he had found his voice at last.

“I ain't got any,” replied the child sullenly.

“You ain't got any? Then what in blazes are you doing here all by yourself?” demanded Jim; he was quite indignant.

The child made no response to this, but his restless glance searched the faces of the two men. His expression was one of dark mistrust; it almost seemed that he meditated flight; but the Missourian's hand was on his shoulder.

“And so you ain't got no pa?” said the latter ingratiatingly, for he recognized something of the boy's distrust and suspicion, though he was quite at a loss to account for it.

“He's dead,” and his lips trembled pathetically.

“Dead,” repeated the Missourian after him.

“You knew that,” and the child turned on him with sudden fierceness, his small hands tightly clinched, and his eyes glittering feverishly.

“I suspicioned it,” said the Missourian.

“The Indians killed him!” the boy added dully.

“But I allow your pa put up a pretty stiff fight; it was on a hilltop, now warn't it? and your pa drove his teams up there and took out and fit them from behind the wagons—him and those who was with him?”

The child shrank from the questioner's touch, but he answered:

“Yes, it was on a hill.”

“I knowed it,” declared the Missourian triumphantly.

“Knowed what?” demanded Jim with some impatience.

“Why, this little cuss came out of that scuffle back yonder; most anybody would have guessed that but you, Jim.”

“And he come here all by himself? Not any,” but his friend ignored what he said to turn again to the boy.

“There were four other men beside your pa with the wagons, warn't there, son?”

The child nodded, but his eyes still flashed with a precocious sense of wrong and hate.

“I knowed it,” declared the Missourian in triumph a second time. “And it was the Indians they fit with, you're sure about that?”

“It was the Indians,” said the child indifferently. “My pop said it was the Indians.”

“I reckon he ought to have knowed,” said the baffled Missourian. “But they were certainly curious Indians from what we seen.”

“It was the Indians, they said they was Indians.”

“Who?” cried the Missourian quickly.

“The men,” answered the child.

“The Indians told you that, did they? Well, they was real obliging.” He turned to Jim. “I'm having doubts about these heah Indians.”

“Look here, son, what was your idea about them redskins?” asked Jim.

The child did not answer him, but there came a sudden flash of intelligence to his pinched little face which the instant before had been quite expressionless in its abject misery. It was plain he understood what the man meant when he spoke of the Indians; then he smiled slyly, cunningly.

“What I want to know,” said Jim, “is how he got away from them.”

“That's so, son, how do you happen to be heah?”

“The Indians fetched me here,” answered the child readily enough.

“And left you heah?”

“I ran away in the night; when they was all asleep.”

“So you fooled 'em—well, you was smart; but didn't they hunt for you any afterwards?”

“I hid in the rocks.” He pointed vaguely to the broken hills in the west. “They looked all around for me and never found me, but I saw them. Then they went away.”

“How long ago was that?”

The child looked troubled.

“I don't know,” he finally answered.

“I 'low you ain't forgot your name?”

“No.

“Well, what is it, son?”

“Benny Rogers,” then all at once he began to cry from sheer weakness and wretchedness.

The two men were puzzled and mystified. There was that one point about the Indians that they could not understand; and yet what they had seen in the ditch was in accord with their preconceived notions as to Indian warfare.

“We'd better go into camp, Jim,” said the Missourian. “You keep hold of the boy while I unsaddle the mules and turn them out,” but midway in his task he paused and glanced at the child who was still crying softly, miserably.

“I half believe the little codger lied to us,” he muttered. “Well, maybe it was Indians after all, he surely ought to know.”