The girl shook her head. “I have no friends except among the Shawnees,” she answered. “Perhaps I had better go back to them.” As she spoke she half closed her eyes, but through her long, curling eyelashes she watched Jack’s face.
“Go back to the Indians! Great Scott! You can’t do that.”
“But where then shall I go?”
“Well——” Jack scratched his head—“we’ll have to think about that. Maybe we’ll be able to find out something about your people when we get to Fort Wayne.”
The wagon had been moving slower and slower, the tired mules showing little desire to hasten. As Jack finished speaking they stopped short, and Williams turned around.
“Say!” he said. “These mules are plumb wore out. We got to stop unless you want to kill ’em.”
Jack rode to the front of the wagon and stared ahead through the dimming corridors of coming night. All afternoon the wagon had been moving through a deepening gloom, and now the darkness seemed to have shut down. One single patch of blue sky, far ahead, told where the road came out for a moment on the bank of the river, and showed that the sun had not yet set.
“There seems to be an opening a couple of hundred yards ahead,” he said. “We’ll stop there. Drive on if you can.”
Williams cracked the whip and shouted, but the tired mules refused to respond, until Cato came forward.
“Dat ain’t no way to treat a mule, massa,” he said. “Lemme try what I can do, massa, please do, suh.”