Frontier Shack smiled:
“Boys, yer the true grit!” he cried, “jest the chaps to hunt white bufflers. The girls shan’t be Tom Kyle’s long. He can muster three thousand red wolves. We’ll face him—the terror of the Plains—and we’ll free his prisoners, or—”
“Die in the attempt!”
The old hunter caught the spirit that animated the breasts of the youths.
“Yes! yes! I’m growin’ tired of this life,” he said, “and I might as well die fighting the White Pawnee as trappin’ beaver.”
The next moment he spoke to Tecumseh, and, despite the load he carried, the noble horse dashed away like an antelope.
“I’ll crease two splendid horses for ye, boys,” he said, “and then, for Tom Kyle’s pris’ners and—white bufflers!”
The last words were clothed in irony, and they set the two boys to thinking anxiously.
They had chased an ignis fatuus over twelve hundred miles of territory—to die, perhaps, at the Pawnee stake.