[Illustration: He was just pulling himself up]
For an instant Al's head swam, as he realized that before him stood Te-o-kun-ko, the captor of his brother Tommy. Then, with no thought in his mind other than that he must catch up with the Yanktonais and demand his brother, he began running and climbing ahead again with frantic energy. The Indian had fired and disappeared; but to Al's excited imagination it seemed almost as if in overtaking him he would overtake Tommy himself. He paid no heed to Captain Miner and his men nor to Wallace Smith, who had joined them, all of whom were shouting to him to come back. He leaped over the rock where Te-o-kun-ko had stood but the warrior was not in sight. He ran up a little, steep depression beyond and swung around a tree-trunk at its head. An Indian behind a stone a few feet to one side, who had not noticed him so far in front of the line, gave him a terrified glance and fled like a rabbit. Al did not pause to fire at him; but another warrior on his opposite side sent a bullet so close that the wind of it brushed his face sharply, and he stopped long enough to reply with his revolver; whereupon the savage dived between two boulders and vanished. Al rushed on, totally oblivious of the fact that he was getting far within the retreating Indian lines.
Just then, in climbing over a boulder, his foot slipped and he pitched forward and rolled into the narrow crevice between two rocks beyond, where, for a moment, he was held securely, despite his struggles. He twisted himself around in an effort to grasp a point of the stone above him, and found himself staring into the face of Te-o-kun-ko, hardly fifteen feet away, looking at him down the barrel of his rifle.
"Te-o-kun-ko! Wait!" shouted Al. "Te-o-kun-ko, where is Tommy,--Tommy Briscoe?"
The tense muscles of the Indian's features relaxed. His finger did not press the trigger which would have forever ended Al's search. Across his face came an expression of intense bewilderment, mixed, it seemed to Al's fascinated gaze, with grief or remorse. The levelled rifle barrel wavered and then sunk. He half turned away, hesitatingly, then looked again at Al with a keen, searching glance, as the latter lay helpless between the rocks. Finally, with a gesture half defiant and half despairing, he made a few quick, cat-like springs across the rocks and disappeared once more.