d he could
just see her bobbing sailor hat and the flying tail of the blue mare.

Her song ceased as she neared the herd, for twilight was coming down and
the meadow blades had taken up the same soft warnings that she had heard
in the corn. Above her, homing birds called to each other, and bullfrogs
croaked from the sloughs at her horse's feet. There flashed into her
mind the night-and-day horror of the Indian's face and hand, and she
began to whistle a little to rally heart as she rode beyond the cows to
turn a stray.

But suddenly the sound died on her lips. For up from the earth rose the
ugly, leering face, and out of the grass came the horrid, clutching
hand! With a choking cry, the little girl struck her horse, but the next
instant was flung down from her seat, and Black Cloud, rifle in hand,
swung himself to her place.

He dared not fire for fear of sounding an alarm, and he dared not wait
an instant to club with his gun-stock the little girl, lying stunned and
half-dead with fear. Without a backward look, he drove the blue mare out
of the meadow to the prairie and turned her toward the river.

But the eldest brother was scarcely a half-mile behind him. And, as the
strange form came into view, going like the wind through the gathering
gloom, he guessed what had happened. He whipped the bald-face wildly,
following the blue mare. And a race for the Vermillion began!

But it was an uneven one. In a few leaps the mare had lengthened the
distance between her and the bald-face. Discouraged, and anxious to know
what had become of the little girl, the eldest brother resolved to stop.
But as he did so, he raised his musket and sent a load of buckshot after
the fleeting brave.

The Indian, safe from pursuit, answered it with a derisive whoop, and,
turning his body around, still going swiftly, waved his rifle
triumphantly aloft in his right hand and, looking back, leaned for an
instant with the other on the blue mare's croup!

The horse obeyed the sign like a flash. As if the eldest brother's shot
had found her heart, she stopped dead still and threw herself upon the
ground,--and Black Cloud, his face for once almost white, lunged
forward, struck his head with crushing force against a boulder on the
river's edge, and lay as motionless as the rock itself!

* * * * *

EARLY that night, when the prairie lay still and sweet, and the new moon
was swimming westward from cloud-island to clou