On the War-Trail.
Scarcely staying to quench my thirst, I led my horse across the stream, and commenced scrutinising the trail upon the opposite bank. The faithful trackers were by my side—no fear of them lagging behind.
I had won the hearts of both these men; and that they would have risked life to serve me, I could no longer doubt, since over and over again they had risked it. For Garey strong, courageous, handsome in the true sense, and noble-hearted, I felt real friendship, which the young trapper reciprocated. For his older comrade, the feeling. I had was like himself—indefinable, indescribable. It was strongly tinctured with admiration, but admiration of the intellectual rather than the moral or personal qualities of the man.
Instead of intellectual, I should rather say instinctive—for his keen intuitive thoughts appeared more like instincts, than the results of a process of ratiocination.
That the old trapper admired me—in his own phraseology, “liked me mightily”—I was aware. He was equally zealous as the younger in my service; but too free an exhibition of zeal was in his eyes a weakness, and he endeavoured to conceal it. His admiration of myself was perhaps owing to the fact that I neither attempted to thwart him in his humours nor rival him in his peculiar knowledge—the craft of the prairie. In this I was but his pupil, and behaved as such, generally deferring to his judgment.
Another impulse acted upon the trackers—sheer love of the part they were now playing. Just as the hound loves the trail, so did they; and hunger, thirst, weariness, one or all must be felt to an extreme degree before they would voluntarily forsake it.
Scarcely staying, therefore, to quench their thirst, they followed me out of the water; and all three of us together bent our attention to the sign.
It was a war-trail—a true war-trail. There was not the track of a dog—not the drag of a lodge-pole upon it. Had it been a moving encampment of peaceable Indians, these signs would have been visible; moreover, there would have been seen numerous footsteps of Indian women—of squaws; for the slave-wife of the lordly Comanche is compelled to traverse the prairies à pied, loaded like the packhorse that follows at her heels!
But though no foot-prints of Indian women appeared, there were tracks of women, scores of them, plainly imprinted in the soil of the river-bank. Those slender impressions, scarcely a span in length, smoothly moulded in the mud, were not to be mistaken for the footsteps of an Indian squaw. There was not the wide divergence at the heels with the toes turned inward; neither was there the moccasin-print. No: those tiny tracks must have been made by women of that nation who possess the smallest and prettiest feet in the world—by women of Mexico.
“Captives!” we exclaimed, as soon as our eyes rested upon the tracks.