“Tecumseh, by Joshua!” he exclaimed. “Boy, I thought he was captured with you.”
“No!” answered young Shafer. “I should have told you. Tecumseh broke from us when we rode from the village last night; and his wild neighings soon died away to our left.”
“Dash me! if we ain’t lucky,” ejaculated Shackelford, leaving the Ogallah mustang, and a moment later he griped the bridle of his own dear horse.
In the exuberance of his joy, he was stroking Tecumseh’s neck, when a shriek, followed by Tom Kyle’s stern voice, saluted his ears!
He turned and beheld Gold Feather covering the young buffalo-hunters with a brace of revolvers, while the renegade’s rifle was aimed at his own head. Kyle sat bolt upright in the saddle.
“Shackelford, we’re going to part here,” said the Pawnee king, “and I guess we’ll leave you to the buzzards. Curse your heart! you tried to take me to Fort Kearney once, but I didn’t go, eh, Shackelford? Now, say your prayers. Ned, count twenty-five in the Apache tongue, and, at the end of that count, we’ll empty our weapons and go to Mexico.”
The White Apache began in a low tone, and the doomed ones looked at each other in silence.
There seemed no escape from death now; it had grown into a palpable monster and was very near.
Frontier Shack stood beside the iron-gray whose jaws champed the bit impatiently, and his eyes regarded the determined renegade.
Lina Aiken and Mabel Denison stood spellbound in the mountain pass, feeling that they were the innocent cause of the dreadful tableau.