"I don't know," I answered, "but orchards and cornfields and church steeples and schoolhouses and little homes with children unafraid, have been creeping across America for a hundred years and more."
"So they have; but oh, the cost av it all! The Government puts the land at a dollar and a quarter an acre, wid your courage and fightin' strength and quickest wits, and by and by your heart's blood and a grave wid no top cover, like a fruit tart, sometimes, let alone a tomb-stone, as the total cost av the prairie sod. It's a great story now, aven if nobody should care to read it in a gineration or so."
So O'mie philosophized and I sat listening, whittling the while a piece of soft pine, the broken end of a cracker box.
"Now, Phil, where did you get that knife?" O'mie asked suddenly.
"That's the knife I found in the Hermit's Cave one May day nearly six years ago, when I went down there after a lazy red-headed Irishman. I found it to-day down in my Saratoga trunk. See the name?" I pointed to the script lettering, spelling out slowly—"Jean Le Claire."
"Well, give it to me. I got it away from the 'good Injun' first." O'mie deftly wrenched it out of my hand. "Let me kape it, Phil. I've a sort of fore-warnin' I may nade it soon."
"Keep it if you want to, you grasping son of Erin," I replied carelessly.
We were talking idly now, to hide the heaviness of our sorrow as we thought of Bud down under the clods, whose going had left us two so lonely and homesick.
Two days later when I found time to slip away to our sanctuary and be alone for a little while, my eye fell upon my feather-decked hat, crushed and shapeless as if it had been trampled on, lying just at the corner where I came into the nook. I turned it listlessly in my hands and stood wrapped in sorrowful thought. A low chuckle broke the spell, and at the same moment a lariat whizzed through the air and encircled my body. A jerk and I was thrown to the ground, my arms held to my sides. Almost before I could begin to struggle the coils of the rope were deftly bound about me and I was helpless as a mummy. Then Jean Pahusca, deliberate, cruel, mocking, sat down beside me. The gray afternoon was growing late, and the sun was showing through the thin clouds in the west. Down below us was a beautiful little park with its grove of white-oak trees, and beyond was the river. I could see it all as I lay on the sloping shelf of stone—the sky, and the grove and the bit of river with the Arapahoe and Kiowa tepees under the shadow of the fort, and the flag floating lazily above the garrison's tents. It was a peaceful scene, but near me was an enemy cutting me off from all this serenity and safety. In his own time he spoke deliberately. He had sat long preparing his thought.
"Phil Baronet, you may know now you are at the end of your game. I have waited long. An Indian learns to wait. I have waited ever since the night you put the pink flowers on her head—Star-face's. You are strong, you are not afraid, you are quick and cunning, you are lucky. But you are in my land now. You have no more strength, and your cunning and courage and luck are useless. They don't know where you are. They don't know about this place." He pointed toward the tents as he spoke. "When they do find you, you won't do them any good." He laughed mockingly but not unmusically. "They'll say, 'accidental death by hunters,' as they said of Bud. Bah! I was fooled by his hat. I thought he was you. But he deserved it, anyhow."