Page:Scribner's Monthly, Volume 12 (May–October 1876).djvu/25

Rh followed. His first question was for the White Hawk, but where she was no one knew. Two of the men thought she had been with Miss Perry; but this, Eunice denied. Ransom was sure that she came to him and pointed to the sky, while he was carrying in the dinner. But Harrod doubted this, and the old man's story was confused. Were the girls together? Had the same enemy pounced on both? Harrod tried to think so and to make Eunice think so. But Eunice did not think so. She thought only of the broken bit of tupelo, and of this little white cup, which she still clutched in her hand. From the first moment Eunice had known what would have happened to her had that beast driven her out over the water. And from the first moment one thought, one question had overwhelmed her, "What shall I say to him to tell him that I let his darling go, for one instant, from my eye?" Then Harrod told Ransom that he must stay with Miss Eunice while they were gone.

Ransom said, bluntly, that he would be hanged if he would. Miss Inez was not far away, and he would find her before the whole crew on 'em saw anything on her.

But Harrod called him away from the throng. "Ransom, listen to me," he said. "If Miss Perry is left alone here, she will go crazy. If you leave her, there is no one who can say one word to her all the time we are gone. I hope and believe that we will have Miss Inez back before an hour. But all that hour she has got to sit by the fire here. You do not mean to have me stay with her, and I am sure you do not want me to leave her with one of those 'niggers.'"

Harrod, for once, humored the old man, by adopting the last word from his vocabulary.

"You're right, Mr. Harrod; I'd better stay. 'N' I'll bet ten dollars, now, Miss Inez'll be the first one to come in to the fire, while you's lookin' after her. 'Taint the fust time I've known her off after dark alone."

"God grant it!" said Harrod, and so the old man staid.

But Harrod had not revealed, either to Eunice or to Ransom, the ground for anxiety which had the most to do with his determinations and dispositions. In the hasty examination of the trail which he made when he first searched for the girl, and afterward when he, with Richards and King—better woodsmen than he—examined the path which they supposed the girl had taken, and the well-marked spot at the shore of the bayou, where the beasts came to water, they had found no print of Inez's foot. But they had found perfectly defined marks, which no effort had been made to conceal, of an Indian's foot-print. Harrod tried to think it was White Hawk's, and pointed to Richards the smallness of the moccasin, and a certain peculiarity of tread, which he said was hers. Richards, on the other hand, believed that it was the mark of an Indian boy, whom he described; that he had been close behind Inez, and had been trying, only too successfully, to obliterate every footstep. With more light, of course, there might have been more chance to follow these indications, but where the regular trail of the brutes coming to water had broken the bushes, they led up less successfully, and the indications all agreed that if the Apaches were to be found at all, it was by the prompt push which they were now essaying.

They all sprang to saddle, and even Harrod tried to give cheerfulness which he did not feel, by crying:

"They have more than an hour's start of us, and they will ride like the wind. I will send back when I strike the trail, but you must not expect us before midnight." And so they were gone. Poor Eunice Perry sat alone by the campfire. Not two hours ago she had congratulated herself, and had let Inez, dear child, congratulate her, because, at the Brasses River, more than half, and by far the worst half, of their bold enterprise was over. Over and well over! And now one wretched hour, in which she had been more careless than she could believe, and all was night and horror! Could she be the same living being that she was this afternoon? She looked in the embers and saw them fade away, almost careless to renew the fire. What was there to renew it for?

Ransom, with the true chivalry of genuine feeling, left her wholly to herself, for all this first agony of brooding. When he appeared, it was to put dry wood on the coals.

"She 'll be cold when she comes in. Night's cold. She didn't know she'd be gone so long." This was in a soliloquy, addressed only to the embers.

Then he turned bravely to Eunice, and bringing up another camp-stool close to