With some little impatience he urged the pony into a gallop. In an hour he must be at the fork of the Salt to receive Custer’s dispatches. Everybody had wondered why Tom Ray, the only one in the party who had never heard an Indian war-whoop, should have been chosen for the work. It was a case of eloquence. Tom pleaded, and the captain—who wasn’t much afraid of Indians himself—forgot his military caution and consented.
The first two miles of the journey lay back along their own trail to the point where a long depression in the plain marked the bed of some old river. From there he must turn sharp to the right and make for the foot of the lone gray butte, about whose base wound the west branch of the Salt. He had started early, and it was not yet four o’clock when he reached the crossing of the low ground. He paused for a moment and looked about him.
A large shadow rolled along the ground before him and caught his eye. From overhead came the shrill cry of an eagle—the same bird who, in spite of numerous rifle balls, had aroused the admiration of the whole party on the previous day, by its mad swoops in their direction.
Tom cast a reluctant glance at the distant cottonwood and the huge pile of sticks saddled in its crotch. The old egg-collecting instinct welled up strongly within him, but he held the mustang’s head resolutely away. In his mind he already pictured the impatience of the old scout at the fork and, hardly daring to take a second look at the nest, he again brought the little pony to a full gallop.
Cris Wood had been a bearer of government dispatches ever since the thriving settlement of Hopkins’ Bend could boast of a telegraph wire. His greeting for the “youngster,” as he termed Tom Ray, was that of an old friend:—
“What have you been waiting for, t’ give the Indians a chance to scalp me?”
Tom laughed as he looked at the scant fringe of gray beneath the rough, worn hat.
“I guess they wouldn’t be paid for their trouble,” he answered, as he took the well-handled dispatches from the old scout.
“No, not by me,” retorted the latter, grimly. “But, anyway, there’s only one lot of Indians around, and they’re way over at the crossing,” referring to a point on Tom’s return journey.
“All right,” responded Tom, amused at the scout’s time-honored attempt to play on his nerves. “If I see them, I’ll give them the chase of their lives.”