Soon, however, it took a wider range.

The supply of adult women was running short, and polygamy without a female population on which to draw was a barren doctrine indeed.

Strange rumours began to be bandied about--rumours of murdered immigrants and rifled camps in regions where Indians had never been seen.

Fresh women appeared in the harems of the Elders--women who pined and wept, and bore upon their faces the traces of an unextinguishable horror.

Belated wanderers upon the mountains spoke of gangs of armed men, masked, stealthy, and noiseless, who flitted by them in the darkness.