“Waugh!” he grunted.
“Thunder and carry one!” cried Wild Bill, with biting scorn, as he addressed the trapper. “Have a bit of sense, will you?”
“You see it? You see it, eh?” said Nomad.
“Anybody can see that, of course; he’d be blind as a mole if he didn’t see it. But what of it?”
“It’s a head—a black head—the head of a giant! Whiskizoos!”
“Fiddlesticks! Can’t you see, Nomad—you can if you aren’t an idiot—that that which looks like a head is just a big, cavernous hole in the side of the mountain, ringed all round, where you think you see hair, by a fringe of chaparral! The sunshine is lighting up the rest of the mountain, but that hole lies in the shadow, and is black. It happens—just happens—to take the shape of the head of a negro, with bushy, or woolly, hair. But it’s only a rocky hole, ringed round with chaparral.”
Nomad looked again, incredulously.
“Whiskizoos!” he sputtered. “Waugh! It’s shore bad medicine; and the skedaddling of ole Scar-face Conover means trouble for the hull of us, ef we go on. I’m ready ter backtrack ter wonst.”
“Look at it again,” urged Buffalo Bill. “The head is disappearing, as the sunshine creeps down into the hole.”
It was true. In a little while the black head was gone, and they could see the deep hole, with its fringe of chaparral, clearly outlined on the mountainside.