"You don't?" he echoed, turning suddenly upon her, and there was that in his tones which awed her into wonder and silence. "You don't? Well, let me tell you all about it. It was you, and you alone, who saved every soul in that outfit from the scalping-knife and the stake. I sighted your party straggling along just anyhow, and I'd already been watching the Sioux preparing to ambush it. Then while promising my self a good time lying up there on the butte, and looking on at the fun, I chanced to catch sight of--you. That decided the business. Instead of assisting at a grand pitched battle in the novel character of a spectator, I elected to warn your people. Otherwise--ambling along haphazard as they were--they'd have lost their head-coverings to a dead certainty. That is how you saved them." "What! You would have done nothing to warn them? I cannot believe it." "Wouldn't have lifted a finger. Why should I?" he broke off, almost angrily. "What interest had I in a few ranchmen and bullwhackers more or less? They were no more to me than the painted savages lying in wait to scalp them. Stop, you were going to say something about colour, religion, and all that sort of thing. But a white skin as often as not covers as vile a nature as a red one, and for the other consideration look at its accredited teachers. About as good Christians as the average Sioux medicine-man, neither better nor worse. It was a blessed good thing, though, that I had a first rate field-glass on that occasion." She raised her eyes to his as if expecting him to continue, and they seemed to grow soft and velvety. But he did not continue. Instead, he had taken a rigid attitude, and appeared to be listening intently. "What can you hear?" she began, wonderingly. But the words died away on her lips, and she grew ashy pale as her dilated glance read her companion's face in the gloomy half-light of the "dug-out." No need to pursue her enquiry now. For, audible to both, came a dull muffled roar, distant, faint, but of unmistakable import. Even Yseulte did not require her companion to explain the sound. Even she recognised in the long, dropping roll the heavy discharge of firearms. CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT. A TERRIBLE DRAMA. The waggon train had just pulled out.