The speaker’s fine face was shadowed with grief. The tone was despondent.
“I’ll admit that he would not likely pull a prize at a scholastic exhibition, colonel; but he knows one thing, and he knows it well. It may be instinct or it may be intelligence—I’ll not venture a decided opinion on the point—but the proof is abundant that he is, par excellence, the great and only human sleuthhound.”
Buffalo Bill, mounted on a coal-black steed, smiled on the Hualapi, who was the subject of Colonel Hayden’s remark.
The Indian was short, squatty, and in features closely resembled the despised Digger of northern California. The forehead was low, the nose short and broad, the lips as thick as a negro’s, and the chin conspicuously nonaggressive. The eyes were small, piercing, and snaky. Fixed upon the colonel, they expressed utter disdain, for the Hualapi could speak a fair sort of English, and he had understood the purport of the colonel’s slurring statement.
The three men, the whites on horseback, the Indian on foot, were on the edge of the Colorado desert. They looked upon a sky unbroken by a cloud. The horizon stretched away until, on either side, it was lost in the haze of quivering heat. The expanse was unmarred by tree or shrub, while underfoot a sea of restless sand, ever shifting and ever changing, seemed as if it sought to escape the all-pervading, deathlike monotony and silence of the desert.
Add to this the sparse and stunted vegetation that tells of scanty water and burning suns, and a picture is presented of the home of the Hualapi, the human sleuthhound, who by the keenness of his vision follows the trail of man or beast where the best bloodhound would be baffled.
Day after day the scene is the same, until the eye, weary with sweeping the unbroken wastes, contents itself with noting the few signs of life the desert furnishes.
Colonel Hayden tried to gather comfort from the confident assertion of the king of scouts. But his almost hopeless look returned when he gazed out upon the desert.
Buffalo Bill regarded the serious-faced officer with an eye of pity. The colonel’s mind was burdened with a deep sorrow and a racking anxiety. He was a father, and his only child, a daughter, was in the power of a conscienceless villain.
Commander of a military post in Wyoming, he had obtained leave of absence for the purpose of pursuing the abductor of his daughter. Buffalo Bill, then in the government employ, had also secured leave on the recommendation and at the urgent request of the colonel, who believed that if any man in the West could trail the villain and rescue the girl, the brave, fearless, and skillful king of scouts was that man.