“Mornin', miss. I hear they're havin' an Injin scare over at the Barrens. I reckon them men must feel mighty mean at bein' stumped by a lady!” “I don't think they believed I would go, and some of them had their wives with them,” returned the young lady indifferently; “besides, they are Eastern people, who don't know Indians as well as WE do, Mr. Foster.” The driver blushed with pleasure at the association. “Yes, ma'am,” he laughed, “I reckon the sight of even old 'Fleas in the Blanket' over there,” pointing to the Indian, who was walking stolidly away from the station, “would frighten 'em out o' their boots. And yet he's got inside his hat the business card o' this gentleman--Mr. Dick Boyle, traveling for the big firm o' Fletcher & Co. of Chicago”--he interpolated, rising suddenly to the formal heights of polite introduction; “so it sorter looks ez ef any SKELPIN' was to be done it might be the other way round, ha! ha!” Miss Cantire accepted the introduction and the joke with polite but cool abstraction, and climbed lightly into the box seat as the mail bags and a quantity of luggage--evidently belonging to the evading passengers--were quickly transferred to the coach. But for his fair companion, the driver would probably have given profane voice to his conviction that his vehicle was used as a “d----d baggage truck,” but he only smiled grimly, gathered up his reins, and flicked his whip. The coach plunged forward into the dust, which instantly rose around it, and made it thereafter a mere cloud in the distance. Some of that dust for a moment overtook and hid the Indian, walking stolidly in its track, but he emerged from it at an angle, with a quickened pace and a peculiar halting trot. Yet that trot was so well sustained that in an hour he had reached a fringe of rocks and low bushes hitherto invisible through the irregularities of the apparently level plain, into which he plunged and disappeared. The dust cloud which indicated the coach--probably owing to these same irregularities--had long since been lost on the visible horizon.