The afternoon was fairly well along when the two saddle boys, being tired of the sights and sounds marking the grand round-up, decided to gallop a few miles away over the plain.
“There’s a lone pilgrim heading this way, Frank; and he’s on foot too, which I take it is some queer out in this country,” Bob remarked, pointing as he spoke.
“Oh! I don’t know,” his comrade said, “because sometimes Indians don’t all happen to be riders like the Apaches and Comanches, you know.”
“Is that an Indian, then?” asked Bob.
“It sure is, or my eyes deceive me,” Frank went on; “and what’s more, perhaps we happen to know him, too.”
“Do you mean Havasupai, the old Moqui, Frank?”
“That man walks like him,” the prairie boy continued; “and see, he’s making gestures to us right now. I guess he’s recognized us all right. Trust an Indian’s eyes for knowing a friend as far as he can see him.”
“But the last we saw of Havasupai was up there in the valley, when he shut the door of the rustlers’ bunk-house, just when he knew every man-jack of ’em was asleep! To tell the honest truth, I had clean forgot all about the old fellow after that.”
“Well, I didn’t forget him,” Frank remarked; “but he never showed up again, and I had to come away without seeing him. I reckoned he didn’t want Mendoza to know he had played him false. You see, the old Moqui was awfully anxious to learn where his daughter, the Antelope, was. It seems that the rustler married the Moqui girl, and has her hidden away somewhere.”
“Yes, I heard him say she was down in Mexico,” Bob declared. “It struck me that Havasupai must imagine the girl is being badly treated, and he wants to recover her again. Do you think I’m near the truth there, Frank?”