“Yes, sir.”
“Then he will be up to more deviltry, I fear; but, sergeant, your daughter is not here, you know, or had you heard of her departure?”
“My daughter not here, sir?” Sergeant Fallon’s face turned to the hue of death.
“Don’t be alarmed, man, for she only went by Jack Jessop’s coach this morning to Pioneer City to see her lawyer, who wrote to her that he was laid up there with rheumatism, and wished both of you to come on there.
“As she did not know you would return, she went alone; but what ails you, sergeant?”
“Colonel Carr, that letter was a trick of the outlaw chief to get my child into his clutches again!” gasped the sergeant.
The words of the sergeant fairly startled the colonel, and he looked anxiously toward the scout and said:
“Cody, the sergeant is too deeply moved to speak.
“Tell me yourself what this means?”
“It means, colonel,” answered Buffalo Bill, “that while in the Indian lines Sergeant Fallon had a long talk with Eagle, the outlaw leader, and became his ally in an intended capture of himself, the sergeant, and Miss Fallon. A compact was entered into between them, as I understood it from Sergeant Fallon, that he should inveigle himself and Miss Fallon to take the coach to Pioneer City, and he would hold it up and capture them.