in together. Don't you carry any heaviness at your heart now. Your interests are mine. I am not a young chicken, but I am game, and with this new spirit, I feel thar's a lot o' living in me yet! We start on this manhunt together. Thar's my hand, Sam!"

"And here is mine!" added the Cherokee. "The Old Man and me always hold together like burrs," he continued, in a kind of apologetic tone. "And if this ain't the most remarkable fact I ever struck, then I don't want my breakfast in the morning."

Thereupon was sealed between the trio a compact that would bring about strange events, hidden under the veil of the future, so that the most imaginative could not foresee the incidents, far more surprising than this meeting of kindred, not at all an uncommon event in the West, where congregate the members of the Eastern families, so wondrously disrupted and attracted West.

Ridge—still to use that name—and his nephew were evoking home memories, when suddenly the latter felt a touch on the shoulder. Cherokee Bill was making the sign for silence, and pointing out of the cave opening.

There was a novel sound, indeed, in the stilly night air: music as from a seraphic choir, for a score of women's voices were singing a hymn at a distance which the limpidity of the air materially diminished:

"Come, tell the broken spirit That vainly sighs for rest There is a home in glory, A home forever blest; Still sound the gospel trumpet O'er hill and rolling sea, From chains of sin and blackness, To set the captive free!"

"Saints in the Mountain!" murmured Jim Ridge, astonished. "I never heard the likes hereabouts. It carries me away back fifty year', when I was a boy in the church! But what are white women doing here? I am staggered. And tuning up like that, too. That's first-class bait for Crows. The angels must ha' taken a fancy to them, or they are cracked to sing at top of the v'ice, an' redskins on the loose. What do you make of it, Bill?"

"See!"

The hunter stared forth. A yellow light appeared as a lining to a cold fog over a vale.

"Ah, a powerful camp! No Crow men will attack that in a hurry—those dogs want to be twenty to one, and, then, somebody has to kick them on to it. Things are bound to be interesting, but, I judge, we can wait till morning. At least, that's my way. I am ready to drop, myself."

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