“Do you want him along with your wagons?” demanded Jackson.  He turned to Wingate.

“Well,” said the train captain after a time, “we are striking the Indian country now.”

“Shall I bring up our wagons an’ jine ye all here at the ford this evenin’?”

“I can’t keep you from coming on up the road if you want to.  I’ll not ask you.”

“All right!  We’ll not park with ye then.  But we’ll be on the same water.  Hit’s my own fault we split.  We wouldn’t take orders from Sam Woodhull, an’ we never will.”

He nodded to the blackened ruins, to the grim dead hand pointing to the sky, left where it was by the superstitious blood avengers.

Wingate turned away and led the wagon train a half mile up the stream, pitching camp above the ford where the massacre had occurred.  The duties of the clergy and the appointed sextons were completed.  Silence and sadness fell on the encampment.

Jackson, the scout of the Missouri column, still lingered for some sort of word with Molly Wingate.  Some odds and ends of brush lay about.  Of the latter Molly began casting a handful on the fire and covering it against the wind with her shawl, which at times she quickly removed.  As a result the confined smoke arose at more or less well defined intervals, in separate puffs or clouds.

“Ef ye want to know how to give the smoke signal right an’ proper, Miss Molly,” said he at length, quietly, “I’ll larn ye how.”

The girl looked up at him.

“Well, I don’t know much about it.”

“This way:  Hit takes two to do hit best.  You catch holt two corners o’ the shawl now.  Hist it on a stick in the middle.  Draw it down all over the fire.  Let her simmer under some green stuff.  Now!  Lift her clean off, sideways, so’s not ter break the smoke ball.  See ’em go up?  That’s how.”

He looked at the girl keenly under his bushy gray brows.

“That’s the Injun signal fer ‘Enemy in the country.’  S’pose you ever wanted to signal, say to white folks, ‘Friend in the country,’ you might remember—­three short puffs an’ one long one.  That might bring up a friend.  Sech a signal can be seed a long ways.”

Molly flushed to the eyes.

“What do you mean?”

“Nothin’ at all, any more’n you do.”

Jackson rose and left her.

CHAPTER XIII

WILD FIRE

The afternoon wore on, much occupied with duties connected with the sad scenes of the:  tragedy.  No word came of Woodhull, or of two others who could not be identified as among the victims at the death camp.  No word, either, came from the Missourians, and so cowed or dulled were most of the men of the caravan that they did not venture far, even to undertake trailing out after the survivors of the massacre.  In sheer indecision the great aggregation of wagons, piled up along the stream, lay apathetic, and no order came for the advance.