"No, no, let me die here; for I cannot live half an hour at longest. Then, too, I have something to tell this child, and it will ease my conscience, and you are to hear, too, Captain Carey."
"If you mean that she is not your child, she told me that in the hostiles' camp."
"There is more to tell, for it was I who attacked the stage-coach in which she and her mother were coming west to join Brookes Woodbridge, her father. The mother was killed by a random shot, and I took the girl and sent her to my wife, for I knew Woodbridge had struck it very rich in the mines, and she would be his heiress. Well, when he was about to go east, never having known of his wife's death, I killed him----"
"You murdered my father?" gasped Jennie, in a tone of horror.
"And my mother, too--now I know why I never could love you, as my father, though so I believed you to be."
"Yes, I am guilty of the crimes of murder and robbery, and more. I was a renegade chief over the Sioux against my own people. This my wife and son never knew, for they deemed me only one who had led a desperate life in the mines. But my wife can give you, Jennie, the papers that will prove who you are, and enable you to claim your name and the fortune that is yours. Now go your way, for the shots will bring Indian scouts here, and you may both be killed. See, I am getting generous, and losing my feeling of revenge with death's grip upon me."
"No, place your hand here over my heart and you will see that my wound is fatal, for I am slowly bleeding to death. Now leave me, Captain Carey, you and this girl, for her presence haunts me."
"Hark! don't you hear the Sioux coming? They will care for me, and I will tell them that the Red Hatchet attacked me, I killed him, and the girl escaped--go! or it will be too late!"
This Captain Carey fully realized, and, springing upon the horse of the dying renegade, he seized the rein of Jennie's horse and dashed away just as a score of dark forms were visible in the moonlight coming along at a run.
Kind reader, my story is ended, for well you know through the papers that the Indian war, beginning with the death of Sitting Bull, only a short while ago, has ended.
The hostiles, influenced by the speech of the renegade white chief, it may be, decided to come in and sue for peace, especially as the cordon of steel which General Miles and his commanding officers had so skillfully thrown around their retreat, brought them to terms, and forced them to bury the hatchet.