s teeth chattering, and lay awake the rest of the night,
worrying.

Between the wagons and the road the little pack train waited, kept
together by soft bird calls instead of by sight. A plaintive,
disheartened snipe whistled close by and was answered in kind. Hank
almost bumped into Ogden before he saw him. They both looked like
drowned rats, the water slipping from the buffalo hair and pouring from
them in little rills.

"Ain't a guard in sight, or ruther feelin', fifty feet each side o' th'
road," Hank reported. "Bet every blasted one o' 'em is back in camp.
Mules all tied together? Everybody hyar? All right. Off we go."

All night long the little _atejo_ slopped down the streaming road, kept
to it by the uncanny instinct and the oft repeated cheeping and
twittering of the adopted son of the Blackfeet, who could perfectly
imitate any night bird he ever had heard; and he had heard them all.
Horses whinnied, mules brayed, wolves and coyotes howled, foxes
squalled, chipmunks scolded, squirrels chattered and several other
animals performed solos in the dark at the head of the little pack
train, to be answered from the rear. Anyone unfortunate enough to be
camped at the edge of the trail would have thought himself surrounded by
a menagerie.

With the first sullen sign of dawn Tom pushed on ahead, reconnoitered
the Upper Spring, found it deserted and went on, riding some hundreds of
yards from, but parallel to, the trail and soon came to Cold Spring.
Here he saw quantities of camp and riding gear, abandoned firelocks,
personal belongings, and other things "forgotten" by the brave Armijo
and his army in their precipitate retreat from the Texans, while the
latter were still one hundred and fifty miles away. Scouting in the
vicinity for awhile he rode back and met the little _atejo_, which had
been plodding steadily on at its pace of three miles an hour; and all
the urging of which the men were capable would not increase that speed.

At the Upper Spring, which poured into a ravine and flowed toward the
Cimarron a few miles to the north, the wagon road drew farther from the
river and ran toward the Canadian; and here the little party left it to
turn and twist over and around hills, ravines, pastures and woods, and
then slopped down the middle of a storm-swollen rivulet. They turned up
one of its small feeders and followed it for half a mile and then,
crossing a little divide, struck another small brook and splashed down
i