“You were rolled up from head to foot in a heavy black cloth, were you not?” Darke went on, eagerly.
“I do not know,” said Clancy, surprised at so many questions. “But he carried me before him across the saddle.”
Father and daughter uttered simultaneous cries of surprise.
Another mystery was solved!
CHAPTER XII.
THE FOREST ROSE.
Ku-nan-gu-no-nah walked swiftly away with the deadly rifle of Leander Maybob, the giant hunter, still leveled at his head, fairly demoniac with wild and impotent rage. The workings of his dark face were fearfully suggestive of the denizens of the bottomless pit.
Had he been armed he would not have left the vicinity without first attempting the life of the man who had him in his power and who held his very life at his disposal; but he was powerless, having no weapons except a short, sharp-pointed knife which he always carried in addition to his hunting-knife, and this would be useless, except in a hand-to-hand conflict, which even in his wild passion he had not the hardihood to dare.
In an hour’s time he came to the boundary of the wilderness and the broad prairie stretched its level surface before him as far as he could see. Not a tree or a bush was there visible in all this vast plain; only the tall grasses, beat down and tangled by the fearful tempest that had raged through the afternoon.
Turning from the nearly direct course he had been pursuing, the chief made his way, with long, rapid strides, to the place where, in the midst of a dense growth of bushes in the center of which there was a little plat of smooth, grassy ground, destitute of undergrowth, he had tethered his horse early in the afternoon. In less time than it takes to tell it, he was mounted and galloping away over the plain.
In a little while he struck an indistinct, scarcely worn road, or rather broad track—one of the emigrant routes of the North-west. He followed the track for an hour or more and then making a gradual detour to the left, kept on at a swift rolling gallop which he never slackened till he reached the Indian encampment, situated at the foot of a steep, rocky hill that loomed up through the storm and darkness, in dull relief against the leaden sky. Throwing himself hastily from his horse, he stalked rapidly along and entered a wigwam at the further end of the encampment. An aged Indian sat on a roll of skins at one side of the place, in an attitude of deep grief or despondency. He simply glanced up as the chief entered, then dropping his face again into his hands, sitting silent and apparently in great agony of mind.