“All that is left me, besides my weapon,” he added with grim feeling, “is my field glass, but I don’t need that to see what a fix I’m in, and yet I am more worried about Nick than myself——”
He thought he heard a footfall from the direction of the fork of the trails. Grasping his Winchester he moved silently back in the gloom, where he could not be seen by any lurking Indian or white enemy.
“It is Nick returning,” was his thought, as he recognized the hoofs of an animal.
The next minute his own pony, saddled and bridled, as when he last saw him, walked forward in the firelight and uttered a faint whinny of pleasure at sight of his master.
“Heaven bless you!” was the grateful exclamation of Herbert as he met him and patted his neck; “I feared you were gone for good; but, Jill, how I wish you could talk that you might tell me all about Nick and the other horses.”
To say the least, the pony had behaved himself in a singular fashion. I have told how he was driven along by the norther until he passed beyond the fork in the trails, Nick Ribsam catching the faint footfalls as he applied his ear to the ground, which told him the beast was receding.
No doubt there crept into the brain of this sagacious animal a conviction that he was not doing precisely the right thing in wandering away from the spot where his master had left him, and where, of course, he expected to find him on his return.
In addition, the norther, that had brought about this breach of confidence, subsided to that extent that it was no hardship to face it. This subsidence, however, did not reach a degree that suited Jill until he had drifted off for a considerable while. Then he began edging backward, and, possibly because he divined the intentions of Herbert, he followed the main trail until he joined his master at the camp fire.
Among the many extraordinary incidents which attended the tour of Nick and Herbert through the Southwest, probably there was none more remarkable than the action of the pony Jill and the consequences flowing therefrom. He drifted away from the scene of several singular events and remained absent until they were finished. Then he came back, and had he been a little later or earlier, the whole face of history might have been changed—that is, so far as it related to the youths I have named.