Lost with Lieutenant Pike / How from the Pawnee Village the boy named Scar Head marched with the young American Chief clear into the Snowy Mountains; how in the dead of winter they searched for the Lost River and thought that they had found it; and how the Spanish Soldiery came upon them and took them down to Santa Fé of New Mexico, where another surprise awaited them

by Edwin L. Sabin

His head throbbed. He put his hand to it, and felt a bandage. But whose bowed back was that, just before? And what was that noise, of crunching and rasping? Ah! He was on a sledge—he was stowed in the baggage upon a sledge, and was being hauled—over the ice and snow—through the canyon—by—by——

Freegift Stout! For the man doing the hauling turned his face, and was Freegift Stout!

Well, well! Freegift halted, and let the sled run on to him. He shouted also; they had rounded a curve and there was another loaded sled, and a man for it; and they, too, stopped.

“Hello. Waked at last, have ye?” spoke Freegift, with a grin.

“Yes, I guess so.” Stub found himself speaking in a surprisingly easy fashion. A prodigious amount of words and notions were whirling through his mind. “Where—where am I, anyhow?”

“Ridin’ like a king, down the Red River.”

“What for?”

“So’s to get out an’ reach Natchitoches, like the rest of us.”

Stub struggled to sit up farther. Ouch!