“Yit that don’t mean that we won’t have a heap er trouble ef we go on,” said Nomad. “I’m fer backtrackin’ prompt.”
The Indians still groveled, with their faces against the ground, praying mightily to the spirits of the mountains; they were in a blue funk. Three-footed rabbits, eccentric vultures, and giant black heads on the mountains, were altogether too much for their courage.
CHAPTER XXI.
GIANT FOOTSTEPS AND DEVIL BIRDS.
Seeing that his Indians were for a time useless, Buffalo Bill took up the work of searching for the lost trail, calling Wild Bill to his aid.
“Probably you can’t blame Indians,” said the man from Laramie, “but it’s enough to make a sensible man sick, the way Nomad acts. I hope he’ll see a whiskizoos some day, and that it scares him to death.”
Wild Bill’s disgust over the superstitious behavior of old Nomad amused Buffalo Bill mightily.
“It’s as useless to blame Nomad as to blame the reds,” he said; “he lived with Indians the better part of his life, so that naturally his mental machinery works somewhat like that of an Indian.”
The keen-eyed scout had not searched far, out on the edge of the hills away from the lost trail, before he made a discovery; though just what it meant he was at first at a loss to know.
“See here,” he said to his pard, and pointed to a depression in a little hollow of loose sand that lay between some rocks. “What do you say that is—what made it?”
Wild Bill took in at a glance the shape and dimensions of the depression.