"Didn't the horses do finely, Gaspar! I never rode like that, I guess. Where are we going? What did you mean about saving Wahneenah's life? Where is she?" "Don't ask so many questions. I've got to think. I've got to think very hard. I'm the man of our family, you know, Sun Maid. Wahneenah and you are my women." "Oh! indeed!" said the girl, moving a little nearer her foster-brother on the grassy hillock where they had slipped from their saddles, to rest both themselves and the beasts. "You see: we've all run away." "Pooh! That's nothing. I've always been running away. Black Partridge said I began life that way." "You're about ten years old, Kit. You're big enough to be getting womanly." "Father Abel said I was. I can sew quite well. If I'm very, very good, I'm to be let stitch a dickey all alone, two threads at a time, for him. Mercy said so." "Do you like stitching shirts for that old man?" "No. I hate it." "Poor little Sun Maid. You were made to be happy, and do nothing but what you like all day long. Well, I'll be a man some day, and build a cabin of my own for you and Wahneenah." "That will be nice. Though I'll be of some use some way, even if I don't like sewing. Where shall we go when we get rested, boy?" "To the Fort." "The--Fort! I thought it was all burned up." "There is a new one on the same old ground. It is our real home, you know. We will be refugees. When we meet Wahneenah, we'll go and claim protection." "Oh! Gaspar, where is she? I want her terribly. I am afraid something will happen to her." In his heart the lad was, also, greatly alarmed; but he felt it unwise to show this. So he answered, airily: "Oh! she's on, a piece. I pointed her the road, and told her where to meet us. At the top of the sandhills, this side the Fort." "The sandhills! That dreadful place. You must be getting a real 'brave,' Gaspar boy, if you don't mind going there again. I've heard you talk--" "I don't want to talk even now, Kit. But I had to have some spot we both knew, where we could meet, and we chose that. I expect she'll be there waiting, and as soon as the horses get cooled a little, and we do, we'll go on." "I'm hungry. I wish we had brought something to eat." "I did. It's here in my blouse. I noticed at the dinner that you did more serving than eating. There's water yonder, too; in that clump of bushes must be a spring," and the prairie-wise lad was right. The supper he produced was an indiscriminate mixture of meats and sweets and, had Kitty not been so really in need of food she would have disdained what she promptly pronounced "a mess." But she ate it and felt rested by it; so that she began to remember things she had scarcely noticed earlier in the day.