The Prairie Detective: Secret Service Series No. 24 — page 94: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

92 THE PRAIRIE DETECTIVE. pleaded, without one thought of their own danger, and without a single reference to the trying situation in which they themselves were placed. Their souls were too great to be hampered by sel- fish motives, and too trustful of the goodness and eternal wisdom of Him to whom they prayed, to imagine for one moment that He would forsake them in any pass, however trying. They were two noble, large-hearted girls, well worthy the emulation of others, the world over. Their supplication ended, they arose just in time to © meet their father, face to face, as with hair stream- ing in the wind, and the blood trickling from a long and jagged wound upon his forehead, he brushed the door of the tent hastily aside and entered. The hard lines in his face, the stern, cold glitter of his eyes, told that the fight was lost. “Oh, father,’”’ cried Esther, “‘you are wounded.’’ “It is nothing,’’? respended the old man, hur- riedly. ‘‘We must fly from here, and at once.”’ ‘Then all is lost! Is there no hope?’’ “Of whipping these fiends, no! Of escape, yes. There is hope of freedom, if we lose no time. Follow me on the instant.” : The girls needed no second bidding, but passed after their father out into the turmoil and rage of battle without an instant of hesitation. Old Doc Harper, though bleeding from a number of wounds upon his person, fought with desperate energy. His sturdy efforts would have done credit to a man not one-third of his ripe old age. Totally unmindful of his rapidly passing years, and forget- ting in the excitement of the moment that his strength was not equal to the strain it would easily have sustained twenty years ago, he undertook the comicbooks.cor