Chapter XVIII · CONCLUSION.

In a little chapparal not far away they found Vinnie, and near her, sitting on the ground, was Alonphilus, the dwarf. At a little distance was tethered the white horse—there could be no mistaking it—the same milk-white steed that had carried the ghastly form of Meno, the Spirit Warrior, as he rushed by them a little while before, bearing the girl in his grisly embrace.

Pete Wimple approached the animal, as it stood quietly picking at the beaten-down prairie grass, and then kindly touched it once or twice on the back.

“What ye doin’?” asked Leander. “Tryin’ to see if it’s well groomed?”

“No; I was tryin’ to make up my mind if ’twas ra’al, ginuine hoss-flesh, or jist a shadder.”

“It’s a real hoss!” said the giant, stooping, while all their eyes followed every motion curiously, and stretching up the ghastly length of the bony frame of a large, powerfully-built man from out of the thick grass at his feet. “And here’s the Spirit Warrior as has killed and scart to death more Injins in the last six years than ten men could finish off in the old-fashioned way in ten years! My little brother, thar on the ground, a-tyin’ a big knot in the end of that string, ain’t very wide acrost, as ye can see, and the space atween the ribs of this ’ere thing is big anuff for him to crawl in all over. So, when he gits inside of it, and stands upon that white hoss and flings bomb-shells, and fires off rockets among a pack of reds, I guess they think he’s one of the tallest kind of spirit warriors, and about the worst accident as ever befell ’em! I’m a sort of a vantriloquizer, and I uster hide in the woods, and holler like Meno, the spirit, is said to.”

Darke, leaving Vinnie and Clancy to the enjoyment of each other’s society for a few moments, had come forward while the giant was speaking, and as he finished, he said:

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“And that explains the mystery of the oaken chest, also, does it not?”

“That’s all there is of the hull mystery and the hull secret,” said the giant, in reply. “I don’t mind tellin’ about it now, cause I’m a-goin’ to marry and retire from bizness. My uncle Peter—and he was a unavarsal—”

“But your brother is dumb. How did he produce that awful screech?”

Alonphilus raised a small, curiously contrived whistle to his lips, and a moment later, the same wild, terrifying cry that they had heard before, rung out on the air.

Ten minutes more, and they were again mounted and ready to set out for the settlement.

“Sarah,” said the Elder, in his nasal voice, “I ask you again if you contemplate becoming the helpmeet of that worldly man of conflict?”

“Yes, Uncle Tugwoller,” she replied, sweetly, reining her horse up by the side of Leander’s. “You’ll marry us to-morrow, won’t you?”

“If I must,” he said, dolorously, tugging away at the corner of his disarranged dicky, “if I must, and my remuneration is forthcoming.”

“You’ve triumphed, Sally,” said the giant lover, with a tender intonation on the name. “My uncle Peter uster say as how a female would if she wanted to, and if she didn’t, she wouldn’t. I hope the Elder ain’t a gittin things mixed and twisted.”

It was after nightfall before the party arrived at the settlement. At times along the way, the Elder experienced much difficulty in maintaining his place on the back of his horse. Once he lost off his dicky, but he bore the trip with surprising equanimity.

The Elder was alone in the world now, save for Sally, his wife having died two years before.

With his niece, in company with Henry Black—the man whom, in our last chapter, Leander suspected might be the husband of his sweetheart—the Reverend Tugwoller was on his way to join a colony of eastern people then forming in the far North-west, whither he had been called to act in his ministerial capacity. Of course now that Sally had so happily—or 102 unfortunately, he would have said—met with her first and only love, and they had been so felicitously reunited, this plan was abandoned; and the next morning he pronounced them man and wife, at Pete Wimple’s, where the company spent the night in the presence of our assembled friends. He settled quietly down with his niece and her husband, who abandoned the wilderness soon after and took up the life of a farmer in the interior of Michigan. He tried in vain to bring Leander to a realizing sense of his innate wickedness, and began to think at last that Sally might have done worse, after all, when it came to his knowledge that the beatified fellow was the fortunate possessor of two or three hundred acres of fine land, clear of all claims, besides about five thousand dollars hard cash that his father had received for his place in the East.

The dwarf dwelt with them and was tenderly cared for by his giant brother and his kind-hearted sister-in-law, to the end of his life. He always kept the death-record with the big knot at one end in commemoration of the terrible charge of the four men through the Indian encampment and the awful death of Ku-nan-gu-no-nah, the slayer of his parents.

Clancy and Vinnie were married in due time, and, with Emmett Darke, they went farther south, and purchasing a farm lived very happily indeed.

Pete Wimple, the scout, is a gray-haired old man now; but his eye is as clear and his form as erect as in the days of yore; and his story of the chase and the war-path are the delight of all the boys in the settlement.

Death, the blood-hound, died of old age twenty years ago.

THE END.

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