Weeping Leaf, or Dora, saw the figure step forward, as these words smote her ear.
“He cannot be my friend,” she muttered. “To him let my skin be red and not white. He's a white man, despite his disguise—one of those renegades I have often read about.”
Again the girl fled, and left the strange being alone in the path which she had lately traversed.
“I mustn't let my tongue slip any more,” mused the man, thus left near the edge of the cottonwoods. “I must be a wolf, jest like the rest of the pack. I'm the Red Jingo; the Screamin' Eagle of the Smoky Roost is lost till I get out of this pickle. Ef I war huntin' red gals, what a nice one I could hev picked up; but I want to get the white 'un, the sister of that young devil, Midnight Jack.”
“And we will get her!”
“Holy Moses!” exclaimed the speaker, starting from the apparition standing against the nearest as well as one of the largest trees. “War I talkin' aloud, Mid—no! Runnin' Water?”
“Slightly,” was the reply, as the two Indian-like figures came together and grasped hands. “You were talking about a girl—did she pass here?”
“Yes, an Indian crittur. Hev ye been to the tree?”
“No!” was the low response.
Midnight Jack, or Running Water—as the Sioux now called him—felt that he was not far from his sister. He had tracked her captors to the confines of the Sioux town; but as yet his keen eyes had not managed to discover her.