And then he rode away--the wise, simple, and brave old trapper, Nick Nomad. CHAPTER XXI. THE PRISONER. Lena Forest had hardly entered the cabin and stepped toward the bed, where, in obedience to the words of Buffalo Bill, she expected to lie down a while, when a footstep sounded softly behind her, and a blanket fell over her head. Startled and alarmed beyond measure, she yet would have cried out, but that the blanket was drawn tightly about her mouth, and on top of the blanket a heavy hand pressed back the words she would have uttered. She struggled frantically, but uselessly; for she was caught up in arms too strong for her to resist, and was carried quietly out of the room. Lena soon knew she was out of the cabin, for the feet of her captor no longer thudded dully on the wooden floor, but descended, as if down steps, and sank in soft grass now without a sound. Then she began to struggle again, trying desperately to throw off the enveloping and smothering blanket, and making so gallant a fight for her liberty that she tore a feather from the redskin’s head. That feather told her that he was an Indian, which was a thing she had already guessed and feared. She tried in vain to scream for help when this awful fear that she was held by an Indian became certain knowledge; but again that heavy hand kept her from making more than a few inarticulate sounds; and she was being borne on, she knew not where. She became unconscious soon, a result largely of the choking and smothering blanket, and for a time thereafter she had no knowledge of anything. When she was put down at last, arousing at the same time, she succeeded in whisking aside the blanket. Then she saw before her a large Indian, almost naked, smeared with paint, who was drawing a canoe from beneath the bank, and getting it ready, apparently, for a journey on the river that flowed before her. She recognized the river as the cañon stream that rolled by her home, and she recognized this spot as one she had seen many a time, a mile below the cabin, at a point where the walls of the cañon began to contract on the grassy valley, in readiness for further narrowing farther down. The Indian saw that she had recovered consciousness, and he swung around, lifting his hatchet menacingly. “White girl no make noise!” he warned, speaking fair English. The desire to cry out was frozen in her heart, which was filled with a strange terror of this painted redskin. She stared at him, as the bird is said to stare at the snake in whose power it has fallen. The savage adjusted the light canoe in the water, stopping in his work now and then to listen, as if he anticipated pursuit. “White girl go with Crazy Snake!” he commanded, again producing the fear-impelling hatchet, whose bright blade glanced the sunlight like burnished silver. To her imagination that hatchet edge was red with the blood of her murdered father.