And darn my skin ef some of 'em ain't bringin' their wives and sisters along too.There was a lord and lady passed through here under escort last week, and we're goin' to pick up some more of 'em at Fort Biggs tomorrow,--and I reckon some of us will be told off to act as ladies' maids or milliners.Nothin' short of a good Injin scare, I reckon, would send them and us about our reg'lar business.Whoa, then, will ye? At it again, are ye? What's gone of the d--d critter?"Here the fractious near horse was again beginning to show signs of disturbance and active terror.His quivering nostrils were turned towards the wind, and he almost leaped the centre pole in his frantic effort to avoid it.The eyes of the two men were turned instinctively in that direction.Nothing was to be seen,--the illimitable plain and the sinking sun were all that met the eye.
But the horse continued to struggle, and the wagon stopped.Then it was discovered that the horse of an adjacent trooper was also laboring under the same mysterious excitement, and at the same moment wagon No.3 halted.The infection of some inexplicable terror was spreading among them.Then two non-commissioned officers came riding down the line at a sharp canter, and were joined quickly by the young lieutenant, who gave an order.The trumpeter instinctively raised his instrument to his lips, but was stopped by another order.
And then, as seen by a distant observer, a singular spectacle was unfolded.The straggling train suddenly seemed to resolve itself into a large widening circle of horsemen, revolving round and partly hiding the few heavy wagons that were being rapidly freed from their struggling teams.These, too, joined the circle, and were driven before the whirling troopers.Gradually the circle seemed to grow smaller under the "winding-up" of those evolutions, until the horseless wagons reappeared again, motionless, fronting the four points of the compass, thus making the radii of a smaller inner circle, into which the teams of the wagons as well as the troopers' horses were closely "wound up" and densely packed together in an immovable mass.As the circle became smaller the troopers leaped from their horses,--which, however, continued to blindly follow each other in the narrower circle,--and ran to the wagons, carbines in hand.In five minutes from the time of giving the order the straggling train was a fortified camp, the horses corralled in the centre, the dismounted troopers securely posted with their repeating carbines in the angles of the rude bastions formed by the deserted wagons, and ready for an attack.The stampede, if such it was, was stopped.
And yet no cause for it was to be seen! Nothing in earth or sky suggested a reason for this extraordinary panic, or the marvelous evolution that suppressed it.The guide, with three men in open order, rode out and radiated across the empty plain, returning as empty of result.In an hour the horses were sufficiently calmed and fed, the camp slowly unwound itself, the teams were set to and were led out of the circle, and as the rays of the setting sun began to expand fanlike across the plain the cavalcade moved on.
But between them and the sinking sun, and visible through its last rays, was a faint line of haze parallel with their track.Yet even this, too, quickly faded away.
Had the guide, however, penetrated half a mile further to the west he would have come upon the cause of the panic, and a spectacle more marvelous than that he had just witnessed.For the illimitable plain with its monotonous prospect was far from being level; a hundred yards further on he would have slowly and imperceptibly descended into a depression nearly a mile in width.
Here he not only would have completely lost sight of his own cavalcade, but have come upon another thrice its length.For here was a trailing line of jog-trotting dusky shapes, some crouching on dwarf ponies half their size, some trailing lances, lodge-poles, rifles, women and children after them, all moving with a monotonous rhythmic motion as marked as the military precision of the other cavalcade, and always on a parallel line with it.They had done so all day, keeping touch and distance by stealthy videttes that crept and crawled along the imperceptible slope towards the unconscious white men.It was, no doubt, the near proximity of one of those watchers that had touched the keen scent of the troopers' horses.
The moon came up; the two cavalcades, scarcely a mile apart, moved on in unison together.Then suddenly the dusky caravan seemed to arise, stretch itself out, and swept away like a morning mist towards the west.The bugles of Fort Biggs had just rung out.
Peter Atherly was up early the next morning pacing the veranda of the commandant's house at Fort Biggs.It had been his intention to visit the new Indian Reservation that day, but he had just received a letter announcing an unexpected visit from his sister, who wished to join him.He had never told her the secret of their Indian paternity, as it had been revealed to him from the scornful lips of Gray Eagle a year ago; he knew her strangely excitable nature;besides, she was a wife now, and the secret would have to be shared with her husband.When he himself had recovered from the shock of the revelation, two things had impressed themselves upon his reserved and gloomy nature: a horror of his previous claim upon the Atherlys, and an infinite pity and sense of duty towards his own race.He had devoted himself and his increasing wealth to this one object; it seemed to him at times almost providential that his position as a legislator, which he had accepted as a whim or fancy, should have given him this singular opportunity.
