The Talking Leaves | Page 9

say you won't go too? Shall you stay and be a Lipan?"
"You'll go alone, Steve, when you go. That's all."
"Why won't you go with me?"
"That's one of the questions I don't mean to answer. You've told me all about your family and people. I'll know where to look for you if I ever come out into the settlements."
"I wish you'd come. You're a white man. You're not a Mexican either. You're American."
"No, I'm not."
"Not an American?"
"No, Steve, I'm an Englishman. I never told you that before. One reason I don't want to go back is the very thing that sent me down into Mexico to settle years and years ago."
"I didn't ask about that."
"No good if you did."
"But you've been a sort of father to me ever since you bought me from the Lipans, after they cleaned out my uncle's hunting-party, and I can't bear the thought of leaving you here."
If it had not been for his war-paint, and its contrast with his Saxon hair and eyes, Steve would have been a handsome, pleasant-looking boy--tall and strong for his years, but still a good deal of a boy--and his voice was now trembling in a very un-Indian sort of way. No true Lipan would have dreamed of betraying any emotion at parting from even so good a friend as Murray.
"Yes," said the latter, dryly, "they cleaned out the hunting-party. Your uncle and his men must have run pretty well, for not one of them lost his scalp or drew a bead on a Lipan. That's one reason they didn't knock you on the head. They came home laughing, and sold you to me for six ponies and a pipe."
"I never blamed my uncle. I've always wondered, though, what sort of a story he told my father and mother."
"Guess he doesn't amount to a great deal."
"He's rich enough, and he's fond of hunting, but there isn't a great deal of fight in him. He wouldn't make a good Lipan."
The circumstances of Steve's capture were evidently not very creditable to some of those who were concerned in it, and Murray's tone, in speaking of the "uncle" who had brought him out into the Texas plains to lose him so easily, was bitterly contemptuous.
At that moment they were entering the mouth of the gap, and Murray suddenly dropped all other subjects to exclaim,
"We've struck it, Steve!"
"Struck what?"
"A regular ca?on. See, the walls are almost perpendicular, and the bottom comes down, from ledge to ledge, like a flight of stairs!"
Steve had been among mountains before, but he had never seen anything precisely like that.
In some places the vast chasm before him was hardly more than a hundred feet wide, while its walls of gray granite and glittering white quartz rock arose in varying heights of from three hundred to five hundred feet.
"Come on, Steve!"
"You won't find any game in here. A rabbit couldn't get enough to live on among such rocks as these."
"Come right along! I want to get a look at the ledges up there. There's no telling what we may stumble upon."
Steve's young eyes were fully occupied, as they pushed forward, with the strange beauty and grandeur of the scenery above, beyond, and behind him. The air was clear and almost cool, and there was plenty of light in the shadiest nooks of the chasm.
"What torrents of water must pour down through here at some seasons of the year," he was saying to himself, when his companion suddenly stopped, with a sharp, "Hist! Look there!" and raised his rifle.
Steve looked.
Away up on the edge of the beetling white crag at their right, the first "game" they had seen that day was calmly gazing down upon them.
A "big-horn antelope" has the best nerves in the world, and it is nothing to him how high may be the precipice on the edge of which he is standing. His head never gets dizzy, and his feet never slip, for he was made to live in that kind of country, and feels entirely at home in spots where no other living thing cares to follow him.
That was a splendid specimen of what the first settlers called the "Rocky Mountain sheep," until they found that it was not a sheep at all, but an "antelope." His strong, wide, curling horns were of the largest size, and gave him an expression of dignity and wisdom as he peered down upon the hunters who had intruded upon his solitudes. He would have shown more wisdom by not looking at all, for in a moment more the sharp crack of Murray's rifle awoke the echoes of the ca?on, and then, with a great bound, the big-horn came tumbling down among the rocks, almost at Steve Harrison's feet.
"He's a little battered by his fall," said Murray, "that's a fact. But he'll