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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