“Thunder, Buffler! Ther papoose is done for!” yelled Nomad, driving the spurs to Hide-rack’s flanks, and dashing ahead. “Look out, Nick!” cried Hickok, sending his own steed to the left sharply to reconnoitre the position, as Buffalo Bill had instantly galloped away to the right. If Nomad heard he did not heed, but, drawing his revolver, he dashed up the ridge and over the crest at whirlwind speed. But the trapper had barely reached the highest point of the hill than there came the report of two rifles, almost together, and the scout and Hickok saw the brave old Nomad reel in the saddle for a moment, then throw up his revolver, and bang! bang! bang! as he plunged from sight down the other side. Swinging into the gully between the ridges from different directions, Buffalo Bill and the Laramie man were puzzled by the fact that neither a man nor a horse were in sight. They rode toward each other, half expecting momentarily to discover fragments of the bodies of Little Cayuse and Navi. Where old Nomad had faded to was a problem beyond solution at present, for he had disappeared as if he had dropped from the face of the earth. The sounds of firing had ceased, and not even distant hoofbeats could be heard. They rode toward each other rapidly, determined to reach some solution of the mystery, even at the expense of disappearing as suddenly as their pards had done. When barely ten rods separated them, both Buffalo Bill and the Laramie man discovered that the character of the geological structure had changed suddenly. Where the ridges they had crossed in the last half day’s travel had run in a general east-and-west direction, here they were confronted by a series running the other way and, as it were, becoming a part of the first formation, with outcroppings of granite in the higher land to the south of them. Two of these north-and-south ridges approached and butted into the long, high mound they had crossed, and between them was a narrow and rapidly falling cañon running away to the south, its walls ever growing higher and more rugged and broken by sharp angles of solid rock. The bottom seemed to be a bed of sand that had washed in from the slopes above. The first drop to the bed of the cañon was ten or twelve feet, and there the sand plainly showed where horses and men had plunged into it and then floundered out and gone on. Wild Bill was about to plunge his horse over the brink in pursuit of his missing pards, when Buffalo Bill held up a warning hand. “One moment, Hickok,” he said. “Do you see where the trail was mined at the head of the little cañon?” “Sure, and both Cayuse and Nomad went over the brink here.”