“Old Steb., you’re a thunderin’ fool!” replied Tom, with an expression of disgust. “I guess you’re gettin’ childish. I, s’pose, you don’t remember that—that—what shall I call it?—that we see’d near hyar?”
“How did I furget it? How did we all forget it—Teddy, too?”
There was no doubt that Stebbins recalled the creature to which reference had been made. Unquestionably brave as both of these men were, their appearance showed that they were frightened. Their bronzed and scarred faces were pale, and they looked into each other’s eyes in silence, both revolving “terrible thoughts.”
“Right out thar,” said Stebbins, speaking in a terrified whisper, and pointing toward the open prairie, over which they had just ridden; “how was it that we wa’n’t on the look out fur it?”
“Dunno, when we’ve been talkin’ ’bout it all the way. It’s too bad that it should come right hyar—jest near the very spot we’re after.”
“Mebbe it’s gone away,” added Stebbins, speaking not his belief, but his hope.
“It will be a powerful lucky thing for us, if it has.”
As frightened children huddle close together, around the evening fire, at the thought of the dreadful ghost, so these two stern-featured men, whose faces had never blanched when the howls of the myriad red-skins, who were closing around them, sounded in their ears, now instinctively sat closer together, and looked off furtively in the darkness, as if in mortal dread of some coming and appalling monster.
But this sudden exhibition of fear was mostly temporary in its manifestations. As each clutched his trusty rifle, and recalled the terrible weapon of which he was master, their confidence almost, but not entirely, returned.