"Coyotes are scarce in this neighborhood nowadays. Those are Sioux signals, and we are surrounded. No man in this crowd could get out now. Ralph ain't out a moment too soon. God speed him! If Farron don't owe his life and little Jessie's to that boy's bravery, it'll be because nobody could get to them in time to save them. Why didn't he send her here?"
Bad as was the outlook, anxious as were all their hearts, what was their distress to what it would have been had they known the truth,—that Warner lay only a mile up the trail, stripped, scalped, gashed, and mutilated! Still warm, yet stone dead! And that all alone, with little Jessie in his arms, Sergeant Wells had ridden down that trail into the very midst of the thronging foe! Let us follow him, for he is a soldier who deserves the faith that Farron placed in him.
For a few moments after leaving the ranch the sergeant rides along at rapid lope, glancing keenly over the broad, open valley for any sign that might reveal the presence of hostile Indians, and then hopefully at the distant light at the station. He holds little Jessie in firm but gentle clasp, and speaks in fond encouragement every moment or two. She is bundled like a pappoose in the blanket, but her big, dark eyes look up trustfully into his, and once or twice she faintly smiles. All seems so quiet; all so secure in the soldier's strong clasp.
"That's my brave little girl!" says the sergeant. "Papa was right when he told us down at Russell that he had the pluckiest little daughter in all Wyoming. It isn't every baby that would take a night ride with an old dragoon so quietly."
He bends down and softly kisses the thick, curling hair that hangs over her forehead. Then his keen eye again sweeps over the valley, and he touches his charger's flank with the spur.
"Looks all clear," he mutters, "but I've seen a hundred Indians spring up out of a flatter plain than that. They'll skulk behind the smallest kind of a ridge, and not show a feather until one runs right in among them. There might be dozens of them off there beyond the Chug at this moment, and I not be able to see hair or hide of 'em."
Almost half way to Phillips's, and still all is quiet. Then he notes that far ahead the low ridge, a few hundred yards to his left, sweeps round nearly to the trail, and dips into the general level of the prairie within short pistol-shot of the path along which he is riding. He is yet fully three-quarters of a mile from the place where the ridge so nearly meets the trail, but it is plainly visible now in the silvery moonlight.
"If they should have come down, and should be all ranged behind that ridge now, 'twould be a fearful scrape for this poor little mite," he thinks, and then, soldier-like, sets himself to considering what his course should be if the enemy were suddenly to burst upon him from behind that very curtain.
"Turn and run for it, of course!" he mutters. "Unless they should cut me off, which they couldn't do unless some of 'em were far back along behind the ridge. Hullo! A shadow on the trail! Coming this way. A horseman. That's good! They've sent out a man to meet me."
The sound of iron-shod hoofs that came faintly across the wide distance from the galloping shadow carried to the sergeant's practised ear the assurance that the advancing horseman was not an Indian. After the suspense of that lonely and silent ride, in the midst of unknown dangers, Wells felt a deep sense of relief.