"What do you see?"
"I do not see anything that I can really call living," replied Middleton, "but I do see a knoll or slight elevation on the plain--what would be called farther north a butte--and on that knoll is a black blur, shapeless and unnamable at this distance."
"Does the black blur move?" asked Bill Breakstone.
"I cannot tell. It is too far even for that, but from it comes a beam of brilliant light that shifts here and there over the plain. Take a look, Bill."
Breakstone eagerly put the glasses to his eyes, and turned them upon the knoll.
"Ah, I see it!" he exclaimed. "It's like a ball of light! There it goes to the right! There it goes to the left! Now it falls in our direction! What in the name of Shakespeare's thirty-five or forty plays is it, Cap?"
"Let me have the glasses, I want another look," replied Middleton.
His second look was a long one taken in silence. At last he replied:
"It's a signal, lads. I've seen the Comanches talk to one another in this way before. A Comanche chief is sitting on his horse on top of that knoll. He holds a rounded piece of looking-glass in the hollow of his hand, and he turns it in such a way that he catches the very concentrated essence of the sun's rays, throwing a beam a tremendous distance. The beam, like molten gold, now strikes the grass on top of a swell off toward the north. It's a secret just how they do it, for not yet has any white man learned the system of signals which they make with such a glass. Ah!"
The "Ah!" came forth, so deep, so long drawn, and so full of meaning that Phil, Arenberg, and Bill Breakstone exclaimed together: