“No; there’s none here, except--except that _Thing_ that you saw on his hoss. Didn’t I tell you that his coming was to give us notice that something else was coming, and it was on us afore we knowed it. It’s always so.” “Then you have seen it before?” asked Egbert, who was rather curious to hear what the scout had to say about the creature, which certainly had caused him no little wonderment since he had first set eyes upon it. “I should think I had,” was the reply, in a hurried voice. “It’s five years since I first heard of it, though Kit Carson did tell me something about some such thing as that being seen in the Apache country more than ten years ago. But the chap that told me was the only one that was left out of an emigrant party of over twenty. He said it come up to their camp one night just as the sun was setting, and arter looking at them for a few minutes rode away at a gallop, and it wa’n’t two hours afore the red-skins was down upon ’em.” “Is its appearance always the same?” “I b’l’eve it is, but I ain’t sart’in. Leastways, I could never see any thing different. It always had the blanket thrown over it, and its head was as black as a stack of black cats. The first time I run ag’in’ it was down in the Staked Plain, where a party of us were arter a lot of Comanches that had made a raid on one of the settlements near the Texan frontier. I remember there was a kind of a drizzling rain falling and we was smoking our pipes, with our blankets drawn up round our chins, when the critter rode down on us, and stopped jist as he did with you. There was four of us that blazed away at him, each one aiming at the spot where his heart would have been had he been like other animals; and, when his horse turned about and galloped away with him, without his showing the least oneasiness, you can make up your mind that we was slightly surprised. There was several of us that heard of the Terror of the Prairie, as he is called by some, and we concluded that this was the gentleman, and that a row was sure to take place; so we made ready for ’em, and we had one of the tallest scrimmages that night that any of us ever got mixed up in; but you see we was used to that sort of business, and it wasn’t good policy for the Terror to come down on us and tell us to make ready. We was a little too much ready, and the red-skins got a little more than they counted on. We riddled a dozen of ’em, and got away without losing a man or a hoss, though most of us have got scars that were made in that muss.” “Wal,” added Jo, “I won’t take time to tell all I know ’bout that critter, which ain’t much, ’cept in the way he has played the mischief round the country. I s’pose when he took a look at you down in the gulch, it meant that he and his folks was coming to visit you, and we got there just ahead of ’em.” “Captain Shields seemed to know nothing about him, at least he told nothing of what you have just described.”