A STARTLING DISCOVERY.
In the morning Buffalo Bill shot a jack rabbit, and they breakfasted
on that. Bones of wolves on the opposite shore gave evidence of the
terrible night battle with those creatures.
To the woman it seemed almost a horrible dream, and not a reality,
with the sun now shining brightly, and not a wolf or other harmful
beast in sight.
“I feel as good as new,” she said, in her queer way; “only a bit
stiff in the j’ints.” She walked along the river for exercise. “Now
what ye goin’ to do?” she asked, coming back, while the scout watered
his horse at the stream.
“I’m going first to the point where those shots sounded in the night.”
“D’ye reckon ye can find it?”
“I hope so. I located the direction pretty accurately.”
“But you couldn’t tell how fur they was off.”
“No; but if we get the direction and keep going we’ll come to the
place, by and by.”
“Yes; that’s so, too. I s’pose you’re wishin’ I’d go back to the town
this mornin’?”
“Not since you said you didn’t intend to.”
He smiled at her. She interested him, and he was still studying her,
trying to determine her character and what she really meant by thus
clinging to him.
“Well, I’m goin’ to hang to ye; and if you should say I couldn’t,
I’d go anyhow. I think I’m takin’ a fancy to yer. If I was a younger
woman now----”
“What?”
“I think I’d try to marry ye, if I found out you was what ye pretend
to be, and honest.”
“You flatter me,” he said, with a smile.
“Do I? Well, I don’t mean it.”
He helped her to the back of his horse, though she said she needed
no assistance; and they rode on again, going now in the direction of
those mysterious shots.
They had progressed a mile before Buffalo Bill found what he was
looking for--indications of the presence of men.
Hoofprints of horses showed, and the tracks of men, a considerable
body of them. But the tracks were nearly a day old, and could none
of them have been made by the man who fired the shots. There was,
too, the ashes of an old camp fire. Buffalo Bill inspected that with
considerable interest.
“Ah!” he said, as he looked about. “Some one came along after these
men had left; and, finding this old camp and the ashes, he built a
new fire here; and that was last night; and, whoever he was, he did
the shooting.”
“At wolves?”
“Yes, I think so; that seems the most likely guess. Some of the
wolves troubled him, and he shot at them.”
He began to search beyond the limits of the camp, hoping to find
wolf tracks which would prove his theory.
He stopped this search on observing a soil-stained letter which had
been stepped on by a horse, whose hoofs had driven it into the earth,
half-covering it.
He took it up and looked at it. To his astonishment, the address side
of the envelope bore the name of Nick Nomad.
“Nomad!” he said, staring around as if he half expected to see his
old pard of the plains and mountains rise out of the ground there.
“Nomad! He was here.”
He looked about; then took from the envelope the letter it held; for
the envelope had already been torn open. It was merely a note, on
some matter of business of no importance.
“Nomad dropped it by chance. No; perhaps he dropped it purposely.”
He began to search the ground closely.
“What ye found?” called Pizen Jane, who was watching him.
“A letter from an old friend.”
“Funny kind of a post office to be gittin’ letters out of!” she
observed. “What’s it like?--a love letter?”
The scout ignored her question and went on with his search.
He found wolf tracks out beyond the point where the ground had been
torn by the hoofs of horses, thus establishing his belief that the
man who had camped alone there during the night had been troubled by
the wolves, and had fired upon them.
“I wonder if that man could have been Nomad?” was his thought. He
dismissed it in a moment. “No; Nomad is too wary to have gone on
without inspecting my camp by the river; and, if he had inspected it,
he would have discovered me and made himself known.”
He searched again at the point where the letter had been trampled
into the soil. This examination convinced him that the horse that
had stepped on the letter had been of the horses that were there two
nights before.
“Whoever the man was who did the shooting he was not Nomad.”
After a while he returned to where the woman had stood watching him.
“What ye found?” she demanded.
He showed her the letter.
“Nick Nomad is an old friend of mine. We have hunted and trailed
together more times than I can tell you; and he’s true as steel. I
thought at first he did that shooting. But I’m convinced he did not.
A body of men camped here two nights ago; and at that time, or before
that time, Nomad was here, and dropped this letter.”
“Some other man might have had it and dropped it,” she said.
“Yes, that is so. Some other man might have dropped it.”
“Road agents, mebbe. He might have been robbed, and they may have
tuck that letter from him, with other things.”
“You’re good at guessing,” the scout admitted. “All of that may be
true. I’m of the opinion the large party camping here two nights ago
were road agents.”
“He might have j’ined ’em?”
“Impossible. What I’m afraid of is that he was with them as a
prisoner.”
“Glory be! Ye don’t mean it?”
“He’s shrewd; and if he was their prisoner he probably dropped this
letter, to let any one who found it know the fact, or guess it. He
doubtless had no chance to write, or to drop anything else.”
“Road agents!” she said, looking about.
“And now your question of what I am going to do is answered. I’m
going to follow the trail of those road agents, even if it is two
days old.”
“And the man that camped here alone and done that shootin’ last
night?”
“He may have been a road agent, following on their trail; and, if so,
he is now riding on to overtake them. We can tell better about that
as we go on.”
“Or he may’ve been somebody follerin’ them, same as I am, and you?”
“Very true.”
The scout, though anxious now to go on as fast as possible, did not
give over the search of this camping spot until he was sure there was
nothing unfound that could aid him.
“Mebbe he’s one o’ the men I’m lookin’ fur,” said Pizen Jane, as she
mounted to go on. “I don’t reckon he is, though; ’twould be too much
good luck. Luck ain’t been rollin’ my way much lately.”
She cackled in her shrill fashion, as if she thought she had said
something funny.
No single trail was observed to leave the main trail, as they went on.
By and by the scout became convinced that Nick Nomad was a prisoner
of a gang of outlaws, though he had no solid proof on which to build
this belief.
If it had not been for the fact that the letter had been trampled
into the ground, showing by that that the horses had been there after
it was dropped, he might have thought Nomad had struck the outlaws’
trail, and was following them, for he knew that Nick Nomad was in
that country for the sole purpose of running down the road agents and
desperadoes that infested it--the same mission that had brought him
there.
Buffalo Bill talked of his beliefs and theories with Pizen Jane, for
he discovered that she possessed a good fund of hard, common sense,
and her judgments were at times valuable.
She agreed with him, when he had pointed out the hoofs, that Nick
Nomad had not been following the big trail; and, if that were so,
then that he had either been in advance of the outlaws or he was
with them. If with them, nothing was surer than that old Nomad was a
prisoner.
“We’ll follow this trail until we know the truth,” said the scout.
“Buffler,” she cackled, “I’m with ye! Ye may think that is a joke,
but ’tain’t; fer I mean that I’m with ye in spirit, as well as
otherwise. And mebbe you’ll allow bimeby that Pizen Jane is a good
deal better than she looks, and has got more sense than any man would
guess, if he jedged by the way her tongue clacks.”