The dying steed raised its head for a moment, it almost seemed as if to acknowledge the tones of affection, then it sank down with a gurgling groan. Dick sprang up, for the Indians were now upon him, and bounded like an antelope into the thickest of the shrubbery; which was nowhere thick enough, however, to prevent the Indians following. Still, it sufficiently retarded them to render the chase a more equal one than could have been expected. In a few minutes Dick gained a strip of open ground beyond, and found himself on the bank of a broad river, whose evidently deep waters rushed impetuously along their unobstructed channel. The bank at the spot where he reached it was a sheer precipice of between thirty and forty feet high. Glancing up and down the river he retreated a few paces, turned round and shook his clenched fist at the savages, accompanying the action with a shout of defiance, and then running to the edge of the bank, sprang far out into the boiling flood and sank. The Indians pulled up on reaching the spot. There was no possibility of galloping down the wood-encumbered banks after the fugitive; but quick as thought each Red-man leaped to the ground, and fitting an arrow to his bow, awaited Dick's re-appearance with eager gaze. Young though he was, and unskilled in such wild warfare, Dick knew well enough what sort of reception he would meet with on coming to the surface, so he kept under water as long as he could, and struck out as vigorously as the care of his rifle would permit. At last he rose for a few seconds, and immediately half-a-dozen arrows whizzed through the air; but most of them fell short--only one passed close to his cheek, and went with a "whip" into the river. He immediately sank again, and the next time he rose to breathe he was far beyond the reach of his Indian enemies. CHAPTER XIII. _Escape from Indians--A discovery--Alone in the desert_. Dick Varley had spent so much of his boyhood in sporting about among the waters of the rivers and lakes near which he had been reared, and especially during the last two years had spent so much of his leisure time in rolling and diving with his dog Crusoe in the lake of the Mustang Valley, that he had become almost as expert in the water as a South Sea islander; so that when he found himself whirling down the rapid river, as already described, he was more impressed with a feeling of gratitude to God for his escape from the Indians than anxiety about getting ashore.