“Coming out here!” she echoed, wonderingly. “Oh, no. I am going back in a few months’ time. I mean when you come to see us and give him the opportunity of thanking you as I never can.”
Vipan looked curiously at her. They had been strolling all this while, and were now well out of earshot of the camp.
“When I come and see you,” he repeated. “To begin with, it is extremely unlikely I shall ever leave these festive plains, let alone go back to England.”
“Ah, you are English. I guessed that much from the very first. But I thought—we all thought—you were only out here on a trip.”
He did not even smile.
“Do you think, Miss Santorex, that a man out here ‘on a trip’ would be up to every move of a Sioux war-party? No; I have been out here a good many years. There are those in the settlements who speak of me as the white Indian, who have more than once attempted my life because I happen to feel more respect for the savage as he is than for that vilest of all scum of humanity the ‘mean white.’ Why, not many weeks ago I was in a far tighter place than this last little shindy of ours, and narrowly escaped with my life at the hands of the latter.”
“Bang!”
The picket posted on an eminence a mile distant had discharged his piece.
“We must cut short our walk,” went on the adventurer. “That shot means Indians in sight.”
A few minutes and the pickets could be seen riding in. As arranged, the cattle, which had been brought near on the first alarm, were now quickly driven into the corral.