“Waugh!” he grunted. “Thunder and carry one!” cried Wild Bill, with biting scorn, as he addressed the trapper. “Have a bit of sense, will you?” “You see it? You see it, eh?” said Nomad. “Anybody can see that, of course; he’d be blind as a mole if he didn’t see it. But what of it?” “It’s a head—a black head—the head of a giant! Whiskizoos!” “Fiddlesticks! Can’t you see, Nomad—you can if you aren’t an idiot—that that which looks like a head is just a big, cavernous hole in the side of the mountain, ringed all round, where you think you see hair, by a fringe of chaparral! The sunshine is lighting up the rest of the mountain, but that hole lies in the shadow, and is black. It happens—just happens—to take the shape of the head of a negro, with bushy, or woolly, hair. But it’s only a rocky hole, ringed round with chaparral.” Nomad looked again, incredulously. “Whiskizoos!” he sputtered. “Waugh! It’s shore bad medicine; and the skedaddling of ole Scar-face Conover means trouble for the hull of us, ef we go on. I’m ready ter backtrack ter wonst.” “Look at it again,” urged Buffalo Bill. “The head is disappearing, as the sunshine creeps down into the hole.” It was true. In a little while the black head was gone, and they could see the deep hole, with its fringe of chaparral, clearly outlined on the mountainside. “Yit that don’t mean that we won’t have a heap er trouble ef we go on,” said Nomad. “I’m fer backtrackin’ prompt.” The Indians still groveled, with their faces against the ground, praying mightily to the spirits of the mountains; they were in a blue funk. Three-footed rabbits, eccentric vultures, and giant black heads on the mountains, were altogether too much for their courage. CHAPTER XXI. GIANT FOOTSTEPS AND DEVIL BIRDS. Seeing that his Indians were for a time useless, Buffalo Bill took up the work of searching for the lost trail, calling Wild Bill to his aid. “Probably you can’t blame Indians,” said the man from Laramie, “but it’s enough to make a sensible man sick, the way Nomad acts. I hope he’ll see a whiskizoos some day, and that it scares him to death.” Wild Bill’s disgust over the superstitious behavior of old Nomad amused Buffalo Bill mightily. “It’s as useless to blame Nomad as to blame the reds,” he said; “he lived with Indians the better part of his life, so that naturally his mental machinery works somewhat like that of an Indian.” The keen-eyed scout had not searched far, out on the edge of the hills away from the lost trail, before he made a discovery; though just what it meant he was at first at a loss to know. “See here,” he said to his pard, and pointed to a depression in a little hollow of loose sand that lay between some rocks. “What do you say that is—what made it?” Wild Bill took in at a glance the shape and dimensions of the depression.