The day on which we resume our story, at the moment when the sun attained its zenith, the mournful silence brooding over the desert was suddenly troubled by a slight sound, which was heard in the tufted clumps that border the Rio Gila, in one of the most unknown districts of this solitude.
The branches were cautiously parted, and amid the leaves and creepers a man displayed his face dripping with perspiration, and marked with an expression of terror and despair.
This man, after looking around him anxiously, and assuring himself that no one was on the watch, slowly disengaged his body from the grass and shrubs that conceal it, walked a few steps in the direction of the river, and fell to the ground, uttering a profound sigh.
Almost simultaneously an enormous mastiff, with a cross of the wolf and Newfoundland, bounded from the shrubs and lay down at his feet.
The man who appeared so unexpectedly on the banks of the Rio Gila was Red Cedar.[1]
His position appeared most critical, for he was alone in the desert, without weapons or provisions. We say without weapons, for the long knife passed through his deerskin girdle was almost useless to him. In the Far West, that infinite ocean of verdure, an unarmed man is a dead man!
The struggle becomes impossible for him with the numberless enemies who watch his passing, and only await a favourable moment to catch him. Red Cedar was deprived of those inestimable riches of the hunter, a rifle and a horse. Moreover he was alone!
Man, so long as he can see his fellow, even though that fellow be an enemy, does not believe himself abandoned. In his heart there remains a vague hope for which he cannot account, but which sustains and endows him with courage.
But, so soon as every human form has disappeared, and man, an imperceptible grain of dust in the desert, finds himself face to face with God, he trembles, for the feeling of his weakness is then revealed to him; he comprehends how insignificant he is before these colossal works of nature, and how insensate is the struggle he must carry on, in order to raise only a corner of the winding sheet of sand gradually settling down on him, and which assails him from all sides at once.
Red Cedar was an old wood ranger. Many times, during his excursions in the prairies, he had found himself in almost desperate situations, and he had always got out of them by his boldness, patience, and above all, his firm will.