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eral hundred yards down the river, and upon the opposite side. At first glance it resembled some star of the first magnitude, which a sudden depression of the bluff had made visible. The scout ceased paddling, and, suffering the canoe to drift slowly with the tide, fixed his keen gray eyes upon the fiery point. "That ain't any more of a star than I am," he added, a second later. "There she goes again!" The torch, for such it was, remained stationary for scarcely a minute, when it began revolving swiftly from right to left, the gyration being of such a nature as to prove that it was swung by the hand of some person. Three revolutions, and then it suddenly reversed and made three in the opposite direction, then two back, then two forward, then one back and forth, and then it vanished in the gloom of the night. Tom scarcely breathed while viewing this pantomime, and when it ended he still held the paddle motionless while he chuckled to himself, for he knew what it all meant. He had seen Indian telegraphy before, and had learned to comprehend a great deal of those mysterious signs and signals by which news is carried across mountain and prairie with incredible speed. He had ridden his fleet mustang to death to head off some of these telegrams, and yet in every case the Indians, by some trickery unexplained to him, had outsped him. "Yes, I can read that," Tom growled, still drifting with the current. "That ere redskin is signalin' to some other scamp, and it's all about _me_. It says that I'm on the river somewhere, and a lookout must be kept for me." Such was the fact. The Indian who swayed the torch meant thereby to appraise some confederate that the scout who had dared to penetrate such a distance into their country, and to unearth their most important secrets, was seeking to make his way down the Rio Gila and out of their country again. This much said the torch in language that could not be mistaken. Although it added no more, yet the sequence was inevitable, and Tom needed no one to apprise him that the river both above and below him was closely watched, and that he was in the greatest peril of his life. Being entirely shrouded in shadow, he could not see the moon, which rode high in the sky, scarcely touched by a floating cloud. "I wish the moon would go out of sight altogether," he said to himself, as he viewed the clear sky. "I'd like to see it as black as a wolf's mouth, and then I'd teach these scamps som
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