"Ho, John! A visitor," he cried.
The man at the fire replied cordially.
"Bring him right along. Pleased to see him."
But Kars had not moved from his seat. As he flung his reply back, he glanced swiftly at the place where his own and Bill's rifles stood leaning against the pale green foliage of a bush within reach of his hand. Then, with elaborate nonchalance, he spread his hands out over the smoldering ashes of the fire.
A moment or two later he was gazing up smilingly into the face of a man who was obviously a half-breed.
The man was dressed in a beaded buckskin shirt under a pea-jacket of doubtful age. It was worn and stained, as were the man's moleskin trousers, which were tucked into long knee-boots which had once been black. But the face held the white man's interest. It was of an olive hue, and the eyes which looked out from beneath almost hairless brows were coal black, and fierce, and narrow. A great scar split the skin of his forehead almost completely across it. And beneath the attenuated moustache another scar stretched from the corner of his mouth half-way across his right cheek. Then, too, his Indian-like black hair was unable to conceal the fact that half an ear was missing. Nor did it take Kars a second to realize that the latter mutilation was due to chewing by some adversary in a "rough and tumble" fight.
The man's greeting came in the white man's tongue. Nor was it tinged with the "pigeon" method of the Indian. It smacked of the gold city which knows little enough of refinement amongst even its best classes.
"Say, you boys are takin' all kinds of chances," he said, in a voice that had little pleasantness of intonation. "I had some scare when I see you come over the hills ther'. The darn neches bin out the way you come, burnin', an' massacrin'. How you missed 'em beats me to death. But I guess you did miss 'em?" he added significantly. "And I'm glad."
Kars was only concerned with the information of the Indians' movements.
"They're out?" he said.