“Now I’ll help you up to the trail,” he said. “You must be pretty well exhausted by this time, and——”
“Lawk, I don’t need no help!”
She began to scramble up to the trail.
The scout accompanied her, assisting her as much as she would let him; and soon they stood together in the trail.
CHAPTER II.
PIZEN JANE, OF CINNABAR.
Having arrived at a position in the trail, Buffalo Bill looked more carefully at the woman rescued from her strange prison in the hollow oak overhanging the cañon of the river.
The woman looked as intently at him, with black eyes that snapped and burned. She inspected him from top to toe, critically, as if trying to size him up and determine what character of man he was. Then a sudden fiery wrath blazed in her black eyes, her lips became pinched, and then opened in one of her strange cackles.
“I guess,” she snapped, “that you’re the man that’s playin’ the fake Buffler Bill trick about here. And if ye aire, then I dunno but I’d ruther been left in the tree than to have been helped by ye. Aire you him, er ain’t ye?”
Buffalo Bill could not repress a smile at her manner.
“I haven’t the pleasure of knowing who this fake Buffalo Bill is, but I assure you that I am the real Buffalo Bill,” he said. “My name is Cody, as, perhaps, you have heard, and——”