Two minutes later, out from under a shelving rock came crawling a trembling squaw. Peering cautiously around, and assuring herself the troopers were gone, she listened intently to the sound of the pursuit dying away down the mountain-side; then in harsh whisper summoned some one else. Out from the same shelter, shaking with fear, came a little Apache boy, black and dirty, dragging by the hand another boy, white and dirtier still, and crying. Seizing a hand of each, the woman scurried back along the range, until she reached the narrow trail by which the troopers had climbed the heights; then, panting, and muttering threats to the urchins dragging helplessly after, down the hill-side she tore; but only a hundred yards or so, when, with a scream of fright and misery, she threw herself upon her knees before the body of a lithe, sinewy Apache just breathing his last. And then, forgetting her boy charges, forgetting everything for the moment but that she had lost her brave, she began swaying to and fro, crooning some wild chant, while the boys, white and black, knelt shuddering among the rocks in nerveless terror.
And this was the scene that suddenly burst upon the eyes of Sherry, the sergeant's boy, as he came scrambling up the trail in search of his father. And then there went up a shrill, boyish voice in a yell of mingled hope and dread and desperation, and the dirty little white savage, screaming "Sherry! Sherry!" went bounding to meet the new-comer. And the squaw rose up and screamed too—something Master Sherry couldn't understand, but that drove terror to the white boy and lent him wings. "Run! run!" he cried as he seized Sherry by the hand, and, hardly knowing where they were going, back went both youngsters tearing like mad down the tortuous trail.
Five minutes later, as some of the men, wellnigh breathless, came drifting in from the pursuit, and Corporal Clancy, running up from the cañon in pursuit of the vanished "kid," both parties stumbled suddenly upon this motley pair, and the rocks rang with Clancy's glad cry.
"Here he is, sergeant! all right, and Jimmy Lane wid him."
And that's why Sherry didn't get the promised larruping when they all got back to Sandy.
[DEPORTMENT.]
Half this windy day I've watched them,
In the breeze,
Those long slender tasselled branches
On the trees,
Bowing, courtesying politely,
Doing their deportments rightly,
As modestly, as brightly
As you please.
Why, I never saw such manners,
Not till now,
Such beautiful deportment;
But I vow
All the people that I see
Are as rude as they can be,
Not to stop before each tree
And make a bow.
Arthur Willis Colton.