Phil flushed again. Woodfall’s tone was kindly, but he was hurt by the implication of possible doubt and mistake. Yet Woodfall and the others had ample excuse for such doubts. There was not the remotest sign of an enemy. Could he really have been mistaken? Could it have been something like a waking dream? Could his nerves have been so upset that they made his eyes see that which was not? He stared for a full minute at the empty face of the river, and then a voice called: "Oh, you men, come down here! I’ve something to show you!" It was Bill Breakstone, who had slipped away from them and gone down the bank. His voice came from a point at least a hundred yards down the stream, and the men in a group followed the sound of it, descending the slope with the aid of weeds and bushes. Bill was standing at the edge of a little cove which the water had hollowed out of the soft soil, and something dark lay at his feet. "I dragged this out of the water," he said. "It was floating along, when an eddy brought it into this cove." They looked down, and Phil shut off a cry with his closed teeth. The body, a Comanche warrior, entirely naked, lay upon its back. There was a bullet hole in the center of the forehead. The features, even in death, were exactly those that the boy had seen rising from the water, sinister, savage, terrible beyond expression. Phil felt a cold horror creeping through all his bones, but it was the look of this dead face more than the fact that he had killed a man. He shuddered to think what so much malignant cruelty could have done had it gained the chance. "Well, men," said Bill Breakstone quietly, "was the story our young friend here told such stuff as dreams are made on, or did it really happen?" "The boy told the truth, and he was watching well," said a half dozen together. The old frontiersman who had so plainly expressed his disbelief in Phil--Gard was his name--extended his hand and said to the lad: "I take it all back. You’ve saved us from an ambush that would have cost us a lot of men. I was a fool. Shake hands." Phil, with a great leap of pride, took the proffered hand and shook it heartily. "I don’t blame you, Mr. Gard," he said. "Things certainly looked against me." "The Comanches naturally took to flight when their leader was killed," said Woodfall. "They could not carry through such an attempt without surprise, but good eyes stopped them." Phil’s heart leaped again with pride, but he said nothing. They climbed back up the slope, and the guard in the timber was tripled for the short time until day. Phil was told that, as he had already done so much, he might go off duty now.