"Perhaps if some wandering 'Danite' had discovered me, in my helpless condition, instead of your gentle self, I should now indeed have no need for help or comfort in this life."
"Indeed, sir, you mistake my people. They are not murderers nor cut-throats. I have heard that the 'gentiles' think that there are wicked men among us banded together to kill people, but in all my life I never saw or knew of such a band or ever saw such a being as a 'Danite.'"
The officer saw he had gone a little too far, and so he turned his face away and with a sigh, he moved toward the fast-setting sun, and murmured, after a short pause:
"How beautiful the effects of the parting sun-gleams are on your charming wild valley, with its glistening, turquoise lake, the snow-topped mountains, cleft and seared into gorges and canyon defiles, their uneven sides touched here and there with the deep green of the oak or the paler maple. You have a grand old castellated bulwark for the setting of your rural home."
Now, all this was astounding to simple Ellen. To hear her gray, sage-covered, barren valley home described as in any way beautiful, and to know that such lovely descriptive albeit high-flown and theatrical words could be used in connection therewith, was a veritable revelation to her.
But the allusion to the setting sun awakened other thoughts in her heart. Hastily rising, she sought her sun-bonnet, as she said:
"I must go. It will be twilight now before I reach my home. I shall send someone down to help you and bring you to where you can be taken care of."
Evidently this was not at all to the young man's mind, but repressing outward expression of his feelings, he simply asked, "Will you not go back to the place of my accident, and see if you can see anything of my horse? I don't think he would wander away from me, he is too much of a pet; and if you can find him, I am sure I shall be able to mount and get back to my quarters without putting you or your people to any more trouble on my account."
By some queer mental process, Ellen inferred that the soldier had good cause to fear the ministrations of her own people, and yet she did not know how to answer such an inference. So she simply hurried back to the spot indicated, and there, not twenty feet from where she had found the officer, she saw the white horse, quietly barking the cottonwood tree to which he was carefully tied.
She unfastened him, and leading him onward, remarked: