The agent and his child were silent.
“Did you ever read the story of Mazeppa?” the renegade asked, after a long silence.
A low “My God, Mabel,” told the villain that that famous ride was not unknown to his captive.
“So you have heard of that ride,” chuckled Tom Kyle. “Well, Mr. Denison, to be brief, we’re going to make a Mazeppa out of you to-morrow. I’ll have some of my fellows to lasso or crease a wild horse, and perhaps the beast may bear you to Washington, where you can lay your wrongs before the Government. So prepare for the ordeal, I say.”
He stood a moment longer in the doorway, then turned abruptly on his heel, with a fiendish laugh, and walked away.
“I’m going to see what Red Eagle is doing with the Gold Girl,” he murmured, walking toward the chief’s lodge. “By heavens! she shall not belong to him. I had marked her for my own long before the train surrendered, and Tom Kyle can’t be balked by a red-skin. Let me get her in my clutches once, and a buck-skin shall bear me to the Apaches. I’ve been among them; they are ready to follow my white plume. What a beautiful white queen the Gold Girl would make! Red Eagle, she shan’t be yours long. I mean it, I swear it!”
A certain light now attracted the renegade’s attention, and his voice ceased altogether. He walked more cautiously than ever, and at last knell behind a wigwam, the build and decorations of which proclaimed it the habitation of a chief.
He lay like a corpse on the ground, and his eyes, flashing like fire, almost touched a crack, through which he was drinking in the scenes that were transpiring in the lodge.
Red Eagle bent over Lina Aiken, who lay upon a couch of skins, pale and motionless.
The red-man was watching her intently.