Well might she feel alarmed! well might she be terror-stricken; for in her abstraction she had turned round twice.
CHAPTER III.
ASLEEP IN THE LAND OF SILENCE.
“Turned round twice!” ejaculates the reader. “Why should she be terrified at such a slight thing?”
For a very good reason, for example: blindfold a person and after doing so turn him twice in his tracks. He then will be unable to tell with any degree of certainty to which point of the compass he is facing. So it was with Kissie. Though not blindfolded, she might as well have been, and might as well have turned round fifty times as twice. The flat plain was everywhere the same monotonous expanse, nowhere showing any landmarks, by the slightest depression or elevation.
No wonder she was frightened, even terrified. Had she been in a settled country, she would only have experienced vexation and discontent at being forced to spend the night on the prairie; but here she was, far from any settlement, lost from her companions, and in a hostile Indian country. She knew the latter to be fierce and bloodthirsty, and was aware they would not scruple to commit any outrage their cunning brains might suggest. She knew they were predatory and gregarious, often rambling in bands of from a dozen to fifty or a hundred. She knew also they were the fiends of the plains—either Comanches or Apaches, dreaded alike by quiet ranchero and courageous hunter.
Should she meet with them, what would be her fate—what her doom? What—
At this point in her reflections Dimple pawed impatiently, and tossing her head, snuffed the air; she was evidently fatigued and hungry and was impatient at being kept at a standstill.
“Quiet, Dimple! you are tired, pet; you have had a hard gallop after a day’s march. Dear, dear me; that I had never left them.”
But the pony was not very much fatigued. She was a pure mustang, but recently captured and tamed, and could have galloped the entire day without faltering.