Now Alden Payne would not have had a tithe of the sense with which we have credited him all along, if he had forgotten for one moment the peril which he faced from the moment he came up with the inanimate form of Dick Lightfoot. The turning back of Jethro Mix, and the shift from one saddle to the other had taken only two or three minutes. In the mean time, if there was any danger of thoughtlessness, it was removed by the sight of that feathered shaft protruding from the back of the poor fellow who lay on the flinty earth.