360 WILD SCENES AND WILD HUNTERS. 
exclaimed my companion, as he wheeled his horse and dashed 
down the hill for the valley. Cold comfort that—“take 
care of yourself,” indeed! 
I made one more desperate and unavailing effort to break 
the trance of the vile brute I strode, then sprang from his 
back, ran under the drooping moss, stepped up into the live 
oak, the forks of which were not over three feet from the 
ground, ran along up one of its massive limbs, and had 
barely time to conceal myself behind a dense cluster of the 
moss, when, with deafening whooping, a bronzed and feather- 
bedizened crew of some twenty Comanches swept into the 
valley just beneath me. They paused for an instant on 
seeing my horse, who was standing as I left him, and one 
of them took the lariat from the saddle-bow, but just then 
they caught sight of the flying Virginian, and, with a yell 
that made the very leaves shiver, dashed on in pursuit of 
him. 
This broke the spell upon my Mustang, and, with a sudden 
start and shrill neigh, he plunged wildly through the crowd, 
dragging the warrior who held the lariat from his seat, and 
nearly unhorsing two or three others; then, as if the very 
fiends were lashing him with red hot steel, he flew, rather 
than ran, out of the valley into the plains, neighing louder 
than the savages howled, till he was out of sight! In a little 
while they, too, had disappeared; a gun or two followed at 
momentary intervals, and then the echoes faded into pulseless 
and oppressive silence, broken only by the sobbing moans 
of the wounded bear beneath me. ; 
I was stupefied. These events were so strange, and had 
followed each other so rapidly, that I was dizzy and utterly 
confounded. Was it enchanted land? Here was I, three 
hundred miles beyond the remotest outskirts of civilization, 
perched in a tree; my horse gone; friends scattered or 
scalped; this infernal silence weighing upon my lungs, No! 
There is the dismal moan again! I must go down and stop 
