He addressed turned, and beheld a lank, dried-up individual who might have been any age between thirty and fifty. His hawk-like face was the colour of mahogany, and, but for a small moustache, was devoid of hirsute adornment. His deep-set grey eyes, however, were those of a man prompt and keen to act in the moment of difficulty or danger. His dress consisted of a rather dirty blue shirt and fringed breeches. "Who am I? Why just who I look--neither more nor less," was the rejoinder, given with provoking tranquillity. "And what might your name be--if it's a fair question?" "It might be Jones, or it might not. The question is a fair one, however. That being so, I don't mind telling you my name is Vipan. What's yours?" "I'm Oregon Dave, champion bronco-buster [ranch term for a professional horse-breaker] of Wyoming. I'm boss-guide of this hyar outfit, and the chap who reckons he knows Injuns and their little ways better nor I had best just step out and say so." "If I were boss-guide of any outfit, I'm damned if I'd let a young lady belonging to that same start off by herself to go fishing among a Sioux war-party," said Vipan, with a quiet satire in his tone that was maddening to the last degree. He resented the other's truculent bearing, and intended to let him know it. "Eh! Say that again," said the first speaker, flushing with anger. "We mustn't quarrel my friends, we mustn't quarrel," put in Major Winthrop, earnestly. "It was mainly owing to your pluck and promptitude, Dave, that we haven't lost every hoof of our cattle. And but for Mr Vipan, here, Miss Santorex would at this moment be a prisoner among the Sioux. I was to blame in that matter, and I bitterly acknowledge it." Then he told him the circumstances of Vipan's unexpected and opportune appearance among them. Before its conclusion Oregon Dave turned to the latter with outstretched palm: "Shake, stranger, shake. You're all there, and I'm only fit to be kicked into a kennel to yelp. Guide? No, I ain't no guide, only a tenderfoot--a doggoned professor. Scalp me if I don't go and hunt bugs upon the perairie with a brace o' gig-lamps stuck across my nose. I'll go now and ask the reds to tar and roast me. Good-bye, Kurnel; good-bye, stranger, I ain't no guide, I ain't. Thunder, no!" "Nonsense, man," said Winthrop, clapping him on the shoulder. "We were all to blame. We were informed along the road that the Indians were peaceable, and that all chance of war was at an end, for this summer, at any rate," he explained, for Vipan's benefit. "That being so, we have travelled much too carelessly, although in camp we've been on the alert for horse or cattle thieves."