“I should be blind if I didn’t,” replied the officer. “A pool of blood—as you say, big enough to have emptied the veins of a buffalo. If it has come from those of a man, I should say that whoever shed it is no longer in the land of the living.”
“Dead!” pronounced the tracker. “Dead before that blood had turned purple—as it is now.”
“Whose do you think it is, Spangler?”
“That of the man we’re in search of—the son of the old gentleman down there. That’s why I didn’t wish him to come forward.”
“He may as well know the worst. He must find it out in time.”
“True what you say, major; but we had better first find out how the young fellow has come to be thrown in his tracks. That’s what is puzzling me.”
“How! by the Indians, of course? The Comanches have done it?”
“Not a bit of it,” rejoined the scout, with an air of confidence.
“Hu! why do you say that, Spangler?”
“Because, you see, if the Indyins had a been here, there would be forty horse-tracks instead of four, and them made by only two horses.”