"Answer me," he said. "Would you miss me? Am I anything to you?"

She leaped to her feet, laughing not quite naturally, for her heart was beating hard and she had suddenly shrunk within herself, her spirit alert and angrily defensive in its maiden stronghold.

"Miss you," she said in a matter-of-fact tone that laid sentiment dead at a blow, "of course I'd miss you," then backed away from him, brushing off her skirt.

He rose and stood watching her with a lover's hang-dog look. She glanced at him, read his face and once more felt secure in her ascendency. Her debonair self-assurance came back with a lowering of her pulse and a remounting to her old position of condescending command. But a parting lesson would not be amiss and she turned from him, saying with a carefully tempered indifference:

"And Leff, too. I'd miss Leff dreadfully. Come, it's time to go."

Before he could answer she was climbing the bank, not looking back, moving confidently as one who had no need of his aid. He followed her slowly, sore and angry, his eyes on her figure which flitted in advance clean-cut against the pale, enormous sky.

He had just caught up with her when from a hollow near the roadside Leff came into view. He had been after antelope and carried his rifle and a hunting knife in his belt. During the chase he had come upon a deserted Pawnee settlement in a depression of the prairie. Susan was instantly interested and wanted to see it and David stood by, listening in sulky silence while Leff pointed out the way. The sun was sinking and they faced it, the young man's indicating finger moving back and forth across the vagaries of the route. The prairie was cut by long undulations, naked of verdure, save a spot in the foreground where, beside a round greenish pool, a single tree lifted thinly clad boughs. Something of bleakness had crept into the prospect, its gay greenness was giving place to an austere pallor of tint, a dry economy of vegetation. The summits of the swells were bare, the streams shrunk in sandy channels. It was like a face from which youth is withdrawing.

The Indian encampment lay in a hollow, the small wattled huts gathered on both sides of a runlet that oozed from the slope and slipped between a line of stepping stones. The hollow was deep for the level country, the grassed sides sweeping abruptly to the higher reaches above. They walked through it, examining the neatly made huts and speculating on the length of time the Indians had left. David remembered that the day before, the trail had been crossed by the tracks of a village in transit, long lines graven in the dust by the dragging poles of the travaux. He felt uneasy. The Indians might not be far and they themselves were at least a mile from the camp, and but one of them armed. The others laughed and Susan brought the blood into his face by asking him if he was afraid.

He turned from her, frankly angry and then stood rigid with fixed glance. On the summit of the opposite slope, black against the yellow west, were a group of mounted figures. They were massed together in a solid darkness, but the outlines of the heads were clear, heads across which bristled an upright crest of hair like the comb of a rooster.