The minute he felt the eye of the young lady fastened upon him he let his own fall to the ground, and had his life depended on it he could not have raised them again. He could feel that his countenance was burning and fiery red, and his heart was thumping as it never thumped before. Indeed he feared that he should really faint unless he could recover himself.
He was enraged at himself for displaying such an unmanly weakness, and by a strong effort of the will he overcame his emotion—not enough to raise his eyes, to catch a glimpse at the hem of her dress as she flitted from sight again.
“Can it be that she suspected me?” he asked himself where she had gone. “No, I think she would not recognize me in this dress. Then my beard conceals my features, so that when I look into a spring, as I am about to drink, I cannot believe that I am the person I was a year ago. And my cap; I would hardly know my own brother in it. I would not have her know me at this time for the world, and I do hope that her look at me raised no suspicion in her mind.”
“By jingo!” exclaimed Leonidas Swipes, as soon as he could find tongue to express himself, “isn’t she a picter? If I wan’t engaged now, I—ahem! might sail in.”
“So you are engaged?” remarked Wainwright, glad to find an excuse for directing the attention from his own awkwardness.
“Yes,” replied the Yankee, resuming his eating in a serious matter-of-fact matter. “Yes, I’m fast; and if them Comanches hadn’t stolen them sheep, I calculated being in San Francisco in ten months from now, to take passage in the steamer for hum, and to buy Deacon Poplair’s farm and settle down with Araminty—but hangnation, the sheep are gone, and where’s the use of talking?”
And as if to draw his griefs clean out of his remembrance, he ate more ravenously than ever.
But all that is temporal must have an end, and so did the enormous meal of the three half famished sheep dealers. When they had finally gorged themselves, and were remounted on their animals, they by no means were the woebegone-looking wretches that might have been imagined, in those who had just seen a hundred thousand dollars slip and escape off on the prairies. On the contrary they seemed quite cheerful. Messrs. Doolittle and Birchem were silent, as a matter of course, but Leonidas looked greasy and rather jovial.
As soon as the meal was concluded and the march was resumed, the train heading a little toward the north west, as Leonidas remarked they were some distance north of the pass by which they hoped to make their way through the mountains into Lower California, which in reality was Southern California, a considerable ways north of the Gulf, and not the peninsula known by that name.
Leonidas Swipes was informed by the trappers that they truly sympathized with the loss borne by him and his friends, but their engagement with Mr. Bonfield and the leaders of the train forbade them to unite with them in the attempt to secure the sheep. In fact, the trapper informed them that it was useless for them to expect to regain their property. It would require but a short time for the Comanches to reach one of their villages, where they could marshal a hundred warriors with which to defend their property; and mounted on their swift mustangs, it was almost impossible to compete with them.