ny to follow it. I had no love for Shawnee or Mingo, but my
mind held room for something besides schemes for bloodletting.

And yet it was well for me that I had met Hughes the Indian-hater, and
doubly well that I had brought powder and lead so that he had turned back
with me. We were riding down the western slope and about clear of the
mountains, I trying to think my own thoughts and he talking, talking, his
words dripping blood, when ahead in the trace I spied something on the
ground that caused me to exclaim aloud.

It was a brightly beaded moccasin, very small, and strangely familiar even
at a distance. Hughes saw it and stared at it through half-closed lids. I
leaped from my horse and started forward to pick it up.

"Don't touch it;" yelled Hughes. "Come back! Come back!"

I heard him and understood his words, and yet I continued advancing while
I mechanically endeavored to guess his reason for stopping me.

"Jump, you fool!" he yelled as I stretched out my hand to pick up the
moccasin. And his horse was almost upon me and covering me with dirt as he
pivoted and slid into the bushes, his hindquarters hitting me and hurling
me over, half a dozen feet beyond the little moccasin. I landed on my head
and shoulders with the crack of a rifle echoing in my dazed ears.

Instinct sent me rolling out of the trace and into the bushes. By the time
I gained my knees and had cleared the dirt from my eyes Hughes was working
rapidly up the right-hand slope. His horse stood at the edge of the
bushes, rubbing noses with my animal. I kept under cover of the growth and
halted abreast of the moccasin.

There was a furrow within a few inches of its embroided toe. I broke a
branch and pawed the moccasin toward me and picked it up and went back to
the horses. Then I took time to examine my prize. It was one of the pair I
had given to Patsy Dale. She must have carried it carelessly to drop it in
the trace without discovering her loss. I slipped it into my hunting-shirt
and sat down to wait for Hughes. It was fully an hour before he came
back.

"Couldn't git a crack at him," he growled, his face grim and sullen. "But
you was a fool to be took in by such a clumsy trick as that."

"It's an old trick," I conceded, taking the moccasin from my shirt. "If it
had been any Indian finery I would have kept clear of it. But this happens
to belong to Ericus Dale's girl. She dropped it coming down the slope."

He heard this in astonishment and