a bit, Sam. For baby's sake I wish we'd gone too; but
now,"--her arms crept around his neck, closed,--"but now--now it's too
late!"

For a long minute, and another, the man did not stir but involuntarily
his arms had tightened until, had she wished, the woman could not have
turned. He had been looking absently out the door, south over the
rolling country leading to the deserted settlement.

In the distance, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, Hans Mueller was
still in sight, skirting the base of a sharp incline. Through the
trembling heat waves he seemed a mere moving dark spot; like an ant or a
spider on its zigzag journey. The grass at the base of the rise was rank
and heavy, reaching almost to the waist of the moving figure. Rowland
watched it all absently, meditatively; as he would have watched the
movement of a coyote or a prairie owl, for the simple reason that it was
the only visible object endowed with life, and instinctively life
responds to life. The words of his wife just spoken, "It is too late,"
with the revelation they bore, were echoing in his brain. For the first
time, to his mind came a vague unformed suggestion, not of fear, but
near akin, as to this lonely prairie wilderness, and the red man its
child. In a hazy way came the question whether after all it were not
foolhardy to remain here now, to dare that invisible, intangible
something before which, almost in panic, the others had fled. To be
sure, precedent was with him, logic; but--of a sudden--but a minute had
passed--his arms tightened; involuntarily he held his breath. Hans
Mueller had been moving on and on; another half minute and he would have
been behind the base of the hill out of sight; when, as from the turf
at one's feet there springs a-wing a covey of prairie grouse, from the
tall grass about the retreating figure there leaped forth a swarm of
other similar dark figures: a dozen, a score--in front, behind, all
about. Apparently from mother earth herself they had come,
autochthonous. Almost unbelieving, the spectator blinked his eyes; then,
as came swift understanding, instinctively he shielded the woman in his
arms from the sight, from the knowledge. Not a sound came to his ears
from over the prairie: not a single call for help. That black swarm
simply arose, there was a brief, sharp struggle, almost fantastic
through the curling heat waves; then one and all, the original dark
figure, the score of others, disappeared--as suddenly as thoug