Red Wing was calling loudly to some of his braves. Near him Lieutenant Barlow was shouting to the girl. Yet his voice showed that he did not know where she was. Ben Stevens had utterly subsided.
“What next?” said Wild Bill.
“We will have to work our way back from where we came, in the hope of finding her. If she is hurt, she is lying near the line of our flight. Can we follow it back in the darkness?”
“We can try,” said Wild Bill.
They turned their horses about.
“Too bad that this happened,” said Wild Bill, “just when we had the thing cinched. She may have been hurt, struck by a bullet or an arrow, or may have been badly hurt by her fall.”
They rode slowly back over the way they had come, trying hard to keep to the direct line of their flight.
Soon they saw some of the Cheyennes, dimly in the darkness; and then they were almost in the midst of them. One who rode close to Buffalo Bill shouted to him.
“What was it?” he asked.
The scout answered promptly, in Cheyenne: