hoofs, or broken fragments of speech, blown and scattered even as he
strained his ears to listen by the next gust. This tension of the ear
began to confuse his brain, as his eyes had been previously dazzled by
the sunlight, and a strange torpor began to steal over his faculties.
Once or twice his head dropped.
He awoke with a start. A moving figure had suddenly uplifted itself
between him and the horizon! It was not twenty yards away, so clearly
outlined against the still luminous sky that it seemed even nearer.
A human figure, but so disheveled, so fantastic, and yet so mean and
puerile in its extravagance, that it seemed the outcome of a childish
dream. It was a mounted figure, but so ludicrously disproportionate to
the pony it bestrode, whose slim legs were stiffly buried in the dust in
a breathless halt, that it might have been a straggler from some vulgar
wandering circus. A tall hat, crownless and rimless, a castaway of
civilization, surmounted by a turkey's feather, was on its head; over
its shoulders hung a dirty tattered blanket that scarcely covered the
two painted legs which seemed clothed in soiled yellow hose. In one hand
it held a gun; the other was bent above its eyes in eager scrutiny of
some distant point beyond and east of the spot where the children lay
concealed. Presently, with a dozen quick noiseless strides of the pony's
legs, the apparition moved to the right, its gaze still fixed on that
mysterious part of the horizon. There was no mistaking it now! The
painted Hebraic face, the large curved nose, the bony cheek, the broad
mouth, the shadowed eyes, the straight long matted locks! It was an
Indian! Not the picturesque creature of Clarence's imagination, but
still an Indian! The boy was uneasy, suspicious, antagonistic, but
not afraid. He looked at the heavy animal face with the superiority of
intelligence, at the half-naked figure with the conscious supremacy of
dress, at the lower individuality with the contempt of a higher race.
Yet a moment after, when the figure wheeled and disappeared towards the
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