Kitabı oku: «The Sunset Trail», sayfa 3
“Oh!” retorted Aunt Nettie, retaining, with hand on hip, that attitude of scorn which she had assumed as she listened to Mr. Masterson, “oh, all you can do is ride in an’ say that in your jedgment” – the word came off Aunt Nettie’s tongue most witheringly – “B’ar Shield’s outfit has downed my Billy! Well then let me tell you this, Bat Masterson; thar ain’t no Cheyenne ever painted his face who could corral my Billy. Thar, vamos; I ain’t got no time to waste talkin’ to children in their teens – which you ain’t seen twenty none as yet, Bat Masterson – who can’t think of nothin’ better to do than come pesterin’ into camp with a theery that them B’ar Shield felons has bushwhacked my Billy.”
“But, Miss Dawson,” urged Mr. Masterson, “what I wanted – ”
“No matter what you wanted,” interrupted Aunt Nettie. “You get yourself together an’ pull your freight! If, as you says, in your jedgment Billy’s gone, what be you doin’ in Dodge, I’d like to ask? Why ain’t you back on the Cimarron gatherin’ ha’r an’ ponies, an’ gettin’ even for Billy? Thar, line out o’ here! While I’m throwin’ away time on you-all, my bread’s burnin’. I can smell it plumb here.”
“Aunt Nettie,” thought Mr. Masterson, as he withdrew, “is goin’ to be a difficult lady to take care of. It’s four for one, when I have to offer her money, or try to hang up a hindquarter of buffalo in her kitchen, she’ll chunk me up with stove-wood, or anything else that’s loose and little, and handy at the time. However, it’ll have to be gone through with; Cimarron Bill is dead, and his last word was for me to look out for Aunt Nettie.”
As he swung into the saddle, following his visit to Aunt Nettie, a flush of shame and anger, which even the terrors of that formidable spinster could not suppress, showed through the bronze on Mr. Masterson’s face. The taunt about being in Dodge when he ought to be over on the Cimarron, harvesting a vengeance, had stirred him deeply. To have it intimated that his courage was slow, and his friendship cool, wore sorely on the soul of Mr. Masterson. It was the harder to bear when flung from the tongue of a woman; for his hands were tied, and his mouth was closed against resentment. “One thing,” thought Mr. Masterson, by way of self-consolation, “the man never made a moccasin track in Dodge who could have said as much and got away. Aunt Nettie’s right though; I ought to be evening up for Billy right now.”
Time stood a week later, and along the shallow Cimarron – as in every other region civilised or savage – it was Christmas night. The weather was mild, the bare earth without frost, while on the slow wind creeping in from the north there rode the moist odour of snow. The moon, old and on the wane, was swinging low in the western sky, and what dim lights it offered were made more dim by a constant drift of clouds across its yellow face.
Scattered along the north bank of the Cimarron, a straggling mile or more, stood the tepees of Bear Shield’s people. It was well beyond midnight, and nothing vocal about the camp save the occasional short yelp of a dog, made melancholy by the hour’s lonesomeness. Now and then an ember of some dying fire burned for a fierce moment, and then blinked out. Mr. Masterson, riding slowly down the opposite bank, and taking shrewd care to keep deep within the shadow of the woods, counted seventy-two lodges – a probable population of seven hundred and twenty, for a plainsman’s census argues ten to a lodge.
Mr. Masterson had located the band of ponies, which made up the riches of Bear Shield, late in the dull gray afternoon, while he lay hidden in a dry arroyo. As it grew darker, he had crept nearer, keeping ever the location of the ponies which, in a rambling, ragged herd, were grazing up the wind. Mr. Masterson, on the south bank of the Cimarron, was heedfully to leeward of the herd; a proper piece of caution, for an Indian pony, at the earliest paleface taint to alarm the breeze, will scream like a wronged panther.
Arriving at the place where he meant to ford the river and begin his drive, Mr. Masterson halted for a cloud of unusual size and thickness to blanket the blurred radiance of the dwindling moon. Such a cloud was on its way; from where it hung curtain-wise on the horizon it should take ten minutes before its eclipse of the interfering moon began.
While he waited Mr. Masterson removed his sombrero and fastened it back of the cantle by a saddle-string. Also, he unstrapped his blanket and wrapped it about his shoulders, for it was part of Mr. Masterson’s strategy to play the Cheyenne for this raid. It was among the chances that he would run across an Indian herder or meet with some belated savage coming into camp. The latter was not likely, however, since the last journey an Indian will make is a night journey. The night is sacred to spirits, and he hesitates to violate it by being abroad; in the day the spirits sleep.
While Mr. Masterson waited deep beneath the cottonwoods, a splash from the river’s brink would now and again show where the bank was caving, or the crackling of branches, and the profound flapping of great wings overhead, mark how some wild turkey – a heavy old gobbler, probably – had broken down a bough with sheer stress of fat, and was saving himself from a fall. Far away could be heard the faltering cry of a coyote, bewailing a jackrabbit which he had not caught.
That thick cloud, waited for, began to encroach on the moon, and Mr. Masterson, his pony stepping as though walking on a world of eggs, headed for the river. The place had been well considered; there was no tall bank off which to plump, but instead a gradual sandy descent.
The pony walked into the water as silently as a ghost. The current rippled and rose in petulant chuckles of protest about the pony’s legs; but, since its deepest was no more than to the hocks, Mr. Masterson honoured it with scant attention.
Among Bear Shield’s ponies was a giant mule, renegade and runaway from some government train. This long-eared traitor remembered his days of burden, and the thing to please him least was the sight or sound or scent of a paleface. The paleface was the symbol of thralldom and sore stripes, and the old bellsharp desired none of his company.
By stress of brain, which counts among mules as among men, the old bellsharp had risen to the rank of herd leader, and the Bear Shield ponies would drill and wheel and go charging off at his signal. As Mr. Masterson and his pony scrambled up the bank a flaw in the wind befell, and a horrifying whiff of the stealthy invader reached the old bellsharp. Thereupon, he lifted up his voice in clangorous condemnation, after the manner of his species. The harsh cry echoed up and down the slumbrous Cimarron like an outcry of destruction.
With that cry for his cue, Mr. Masterson drove home the spurs and began a rapid round-up of the startled ponies. At the warning call of the old bellsharp, the herd members came rushing towards him. Placing himself at their head, his “hee-haw” of alarm still ringing like a bugle, he bore them away at a thunderous gallop for the tepees.
Hard at the hocks of the flying battalion came Mr. Masterson. The outfit swept through Bear Shield’s village for its entire length, Mr. Masterson lying low along his pony’s neck and letting his blanket flap in the wind bravely, for purposes of deception. After the ponies, charged Mr. Masterson; after Mr. Masterson, charged a riotous brigade of dogs; the uproar might have been heard as far as Crooked Creek.
As the mad stampede swept on, ever and anon a pony more blind or more clumsy than his fellows would bump into a lodge. At that, an indignant Cheyenne would tear aside the lodge-flap, protrude his outraged head, and curse the ponies aboriginally. Observing the blanketed Mr. Masterson, the savage would go back to bed, gratefully taking him for some public-spirited neighbour who was striving to return the ponies to their grazing ground and inspire them with normal peace.
The flying ponies – the vociferous old bellsharp having fallen to the rear, through lack of speed – wheeled against a thick clump of cottonwood, and then broke north into the open. Their fever of fear was subsiding, they were taking a more modest pace, and Mr. Masterson began turning in the corners, and closing up the flanks, of the retreating band. He made no effort to crowd or press, but gave them every encouragement to regain their confidence, and moderate their flight. Presently the herd was jogging comfortably; and because the wind was in their faces they were furnished no disquieting notice of Mr. Masterson’s paleface identity through the medium of their noses.
The ponies had traveled twenty minutes, and were cleverly bunched, when Mr. Masterson made a discovery. Off to the right in the dull half-dark he beheld a figure, blanketed, mounted, riding like the wind, and busy with the stragglers as they pointed out of the herd. Like a flash, Mr. Masterson whipped his rifle from its scabbard. Throwing the blanket aside, to free his hands and arms, he fell a trifle to the rear, and began edging towards the stranger.
From his riding, and because he seemed so willingly bent on sending the ponies northward, Mr. Masterson felt assured that the stranger was a white man. The expiring moon threw a last parallel ray along the surface of the plains, and Mr. Masterson saw that the stranger’s pony was a chestnut. Also it had the hard and bitter gait of Alazan, the bronco wherewith he had equipped Cimarron Bill when that lost one issued south from Dodge to his wiping out.
Mr. Masterson drew nearer; of a truth the jolty pony was Alazan! Who then was the stranger? Could he, by some miracle of heaven, be Cimarron Bill? Mr. Masterson gave a curlew’s whistle, which had been a signal between him and Cimarron Bill. At the sound the stranger wheeled upon him.
Mr. Masterson pulled up his pony; the sharp cluck! cluck! of the buffalo gun clipped the night air as he cocked it, for Mr. Masterson was a prudent man. The stranger, sitting fearlessly straight in his stirrups, bore down upon him with speed. Mr. Masterson watched him with the narrowed gaze of a lynx; as much as he might tell in the night, there was no weapon in the stranger’s hands.
“Howdy, Bat!” cried the stranger, as he came up with a great rush. “I’ve knowed you for an hour.”
Then Mr. Masterson let down the hammer of his Sharp’s, slammed it back in its scabbard beneath his saddle-flap, and taking the stranger in a bear-hug, fairly tore him from the saddle. The stranger was Cimarron Bill; and in his youth Mr. Masterson was sentimental.
“Where have you been these weeks?” cried Mr. Masterson.
“I’ll tell you later,” returned Cimarron Bill. “We’d better clot up these ponies an’ begin the drive, or they’ll get our wind an’ stampede for B’ar Shield’s village.”
It was beginning to snow – great soft clinging flakes, and each like a wet cold pinch of wool! The snow storm was both good and bad; it made it difficult to handle the ponies, but it subtracted from the chances of Bear Shield’s successful pursuit.
Mr. Masterson and Cimarron Bill, one on the right and one on the left flank of the herd, riding to and fro like setter dogs quartering for birds, drove on throughout a hard four hours. They broke eastward to avoid Sun City; for it would have been impolite to bring those ponies through hamlet or ranch, and so threaten it with Bear Shield’s anger.
With the first of dawn the tired riders, having brought the bunch into a stretch of country choice for that purpose, halted to make an inspection. The snow had ceased to fall, and the sun coming up gave them light enough to tell good from evil as presented in the shape of ponies. While Mr. Masterson held the herd, Cimarron Bill commenced cutting out the spent and worthless ones. When the weeding was over, there remained one hundred and thirty head, and the worst among them worth thirty dollars in the Dodge corrals. Throwing the riff-raff loose, Mr. Masterson and Cimarron Bill again took up their travels at a stiff road gait. They were forty-five miles from Dodge; worn as they were, they should still reach the Arkansas and Dodge by nightfall.
“And now,” quoth Mr. Masterson, when they were straightened away for the north, “what have you been doing? Aunt Nettie was scared speechless. She thought the Cheyennes had run their brand on you.”
Cimarron Bill’s adventures were laid open. Ten miles out from Sun City he had crossed up with Red River Tom of the Bar-8-bar ranch. That well-informed boy had told him of a dance to be given three nights away, in the new camp-house of the B-in-a-Box outfit. “No common fandango,” explained Cimarron Bill, “but the real thing, with people comin’ from as far away as Tascosa an’ Fort Sill. Nacherrally, I decided to attend. That Cheyenne I was after, an’ his pony, could wait; the dance couldn’t.”
Cimarron Bill, continuing, told how he had cut across country for the home ranch of the B-in-a-Box. He arrived in good time, that is to say four hours prior to the fiddlers, which, as he expressed it, gave him space wherein “to liquor up” and get in proper key for the festival impending. While engaged upon these preliminaries he was shot in the leg by a fellow-guest with whom he disagreed.
“You see,” explained Cimarron Bill, “this outlaw was a Texas ranger, an’ after about six drinks I started to tell him what I thought of a prairie dog who would play policeman that a-way, for thirty dollars a month an’ furnish his own hoss. One word leads to another an’ the last one to the guns, an’ the next news is I get plugged in the off hind laig. I wouldn’t have cared so much,” concluded Cimarron Bill, in mournful meditation over his mishap, “only he shot me before the first dance.”
Cimarron Bill had been laid up in the new camp-house of the hospitable B-in-a-Box. Being able to mount and ride away, three days before Mr. Masterson encountered him, he had deemed it expedient to make a driving raid on Bear Shield’s village on his journey home, and carry off a handful of ponies. Thus, by a coincidence of pony-raiding impulse, the two had been restored to one another.
“For you see,” said Cimarron Bill, “I was still shy a hoss, the same as when I started out of Dodge.”
“All the same,” observed Mr. Masterson, severely, “you ought to have sent word to Aunt Nettie.”
“Send Aunt Nettie word!” exclaimed Cimarron Bill. “I wasn’t that locoed! Aunt Nettie would have been down on me like a fallin’ star! Shore! she’d have deescended on that B-in-a-Box outfit like a mink on a settin’ hen! I saveyed a heap better than to send Aunt Nettie word.”
Vast was the joy of Dodge as Mr. Masterson and Cimarron Bill rode in with those Bear Shield ponies; prodigious was the trade-hubbub when, over at Mr. Trask’s corrals – Mr. Wright officiating as auctioneer – one by one the herd was struck down to the highest bidder. Under the double stimulation of the holidays and the ponies, commerce received a boom, the like of which had not before been known in the trade annals of Dodge. In proof whereof, not alone Mr. Short at the Long Branch but Mr. Kelly at the Alhambra declared that never since either of them last saw the Missouri, had so much money been changed in at roulette and farobank in any similar space of time. Mr. Wright of the outfitting store confirmed these tales of commercial gorgeousness, and Mr. Masterson and Cimarron Bill were greeted and treated as public benefactors. Meanwhile, far away on the ravished Cimarron, Bear Shield was making wrathful medicine, and dancing the dances and singing the songs of him who has been robbed.
“Thar, you Bat Masterson!” exclaimed Aunt Nettie, as she heaped high the banquet board before him and her prodigal nephew. “Which it goes to show how feeble-witted you be. Yere you comes ghost-dancin’ ’round with a yarn about my Billy bein’ killed an’ skelped! I told you then, what you now have the livin’ sense to see, I hope, that thar was never the Cheyenne painted his face who could down my Billy, B’ar Shield himse’f not barred.”
CHAPTER III – INEZ OF THE ’DOBE WALLS
Inez was a mustang – a small, wild-born thing, and the pet of the ’Dobe Walls. Those Indians who came calling at the ’Dobe Walls sniffed suspiciously at Inez and said she was the “White Man’s Medicine.” When put on the scales and weighed, Inez kicked the beam at seventy pounds, or about one-eighth of what she might have weighed had she lived out the life designed for her by Providence, and escaped the dwarfing influences of bread and milk as furnished by Mr. Hanrahan’s black cook.
Inez’s share in the life of the ’Dobe Walls began in this way. The horse-hustler had found Inez and her little mustang mother visiting among the ponies when he went to make his morning round-up. The mother fled like a shadow, but Inez, then in her babyhood and something the size of a jackrabbit, fell into the hands of the horse-hustler. That personage of ponies rode into camp with Inez in his arms, and presented her as a common charge. She was adopted and made much of, and soon forgot her griefs and her little mother whinnying among the hills.
Except that she ceased to grow, civilization agreed with Inez. Whether from the fright of capture or the menu of the ’Dobe Walls, and although with time she slimmed and shaped up to be the silken image of a full-grown mustang, Inez stood no higher than nine hands. One might pick her up and carry her under one’s arm like a roll of blankets; and occasionally, for the fun of the thing, one did. To be thus transported, threw Inez into a temper; she was a petulant mustang, and when again on her four small hoofs – as black as jet and as shiny – she ran open-mouthed after her tormentor.
If time hung heavy Mr. Wright or Mr. Masterson would cinch a small saddle-tree onto Inez. Thereat, our peevish one arched her small spine, dropped her velvet muzzle between her fetlocks – as slender as a woman’s wrists – and sunfished about the scene. Inez did not have to be trained to this trick; it was in her blood and she “bucked” by instinct.
The ’Dobe Walls consisted of Mr. Wright’s store, Mr. Kimball’s blacksmith shop, and Mr. Hanrahan’s saloon. This latter mart, of course. The West without a barroom would be London without a club. The ’Dobe Walls was a casual camp of prairie commerce, pitched on the banks of the Canadian, and meant for trade with the buffalo hunters, taking skins for calico, flour, fire-water, sugar, coffee, cartridges and guns. It lay two hundred miles to the back of no-where, and Dodge, ten days’ journey away on the Arkansas, called itself the nearest civilization. The fixed population counted eleven at roll-call; but what with the coming and going of the buffalo hunters there were few moments of any day or night when a count of noses would not have shown more than a score. The public ate its meals in the saloon, which Mr. Hanrahan turned into a restaurant three times a day.
Inez came with the rest to these repasts, and stood about behind the benches and looked over the shoulders of her feeding friends. This she did because it was her privilege, and not by virtue of any tooth of hunger. If by design or accident the door were closed, Inez wheeled indignant tail and testified to a sense of injury with her heels. Since she broke a panel on one of these spiteful occasions, Mr. Hanrahan had been taught to open his portals with speed. The door being opened, Inez would enter, snorting her small opinion of him who had sought to bar her from her rights.
When it rained, Inez took shelter in the saloon. Also, she passed her hours of leisure there, for while Inez declined intoxicants and went committed to water as much as any temperance lecturer, the company she found in Mr. Hanrahan’s was to her liking, being more unbuckled and at ease than were those busy ones of the stores – deep with their foolish barter.
This was in the year when the Panhandle coyote rolled in fat from much buffalo meat, and a buffalo’s skin brought five dollars. The June night had been sweltering hot. In the store and about the clay floor of Mr. Hanrahan’s saloon, blanket-bedded and sound asleep, lay twenty-one men. Most of them were buffalo hunters, all were equal to death at four hundred yards with one of their heavy guns. There were no pickets since there were no suspicions; for were not the Comanche, the Arrapahoe, the Cheyenne, and the Kiowa their friends; and had not delegations of these aboriginal clans been smilingly about the ’Dobe Walls but the day before? The snores and deep-lunged breathings told of a sense of sure security.
Suddenly a pattering racket of rub-a-dub-dub broke on the sleeping ears. It was Inez beating an ecstatic longroll with the door for a drum.
“Who shut that mustang out?” growled Mr. Masterson.
Mr. Masterson sat up and rubbed his eyes. He glanced towards the door; it was not closed. Inez, standing inside, continued to beat it with her hoofs by way of tocsin. Mr. Masterson through the open door could see by the blue light on the eastern-southern sky that the sun was coming up.
“What’s the matter with the baby?” thought Mr. Masterson. The “baby” was one of many titles given Inez. “What’s she kicking about? That Congo hasn’t fed her something that gives her a colic, has he?” Mr. Masterson arose to talk it over with Inez, and learn and locate her aches.
As Mr. Masterson drew near the door, his quick eye caught a movement under the cottonwoods that a half mile away fenced the Canadian. There were five layers of tan on Mr. Masterson’s face, each the work of a Panhandle summer. A moment was all he required to solve the mystery of that move beneath the cottonwoods.
“Indians!” shouted Mr. Masterson.
Then Mr. Masterson closed and barred the door. The door closed, he blazed away from a window with a six-shooter by way of general notice.
Every man jack of the twenty-one in store and bar-room was on his feet like magic. In that Western day, rather from habit than apprehension, one would as soon think of going to bed without his blankets as without his guns. Once aroused, the ’Dobe Walls was instantly an armed fort.
The Indians made a gorgeous charge. There was a red line of them, five hundred strong – picked fighters of the Cheyennes, the Arrapahoes, the Kiowas, and the Comanches. To give them spirit and add éclat to the fray, two hundred of their friends from the Pawnees and the Osages, had come to see the fight. These copper gentlemen of peace and curiosity were seated upon a near-by hill, like an audience at a bull fight.
It was a pageant to remember – that swoop of the red five hundred over the half mile of grassy flat between the cottonwoods and the ’Dobe Walls. Great war-bonnets of eagles’ feathers floated from every head. The manes and tails of the ponies streamed with ribbons. On they swept, each buck managing with his knees his saddleless, bridleless little war horse.
For a fortnight, the medicine man of the Comanches had starved and danced himself into a frenzy. He had burned “medicine” tobacco, and occult grasses, and slips of sacred cedar. Coming forth of his trances and his songs, he brought word that the Great Spirit would fight on the side of His red children. His medicine told him they might ride into the ’Dobe Walls and kill the palefaces in their sleep with clubs. There would be no resistance; it was no more than just riding in and stripping off the scalps.
Also, there were rifles and tons of cartridges which the Great Spirit designed for His red children. These would be as make-weight with the scalps, and pay His red children for the work of waging war. Thus preached the medicine man; and his hearers were prompt with their belief. And thereupon they made stealthy tryst on the Canadian that June morning, and without yelp or outcry or war-shout, swept down upon their prey as softly silent as spectres.
The medicine man’s medicine would have been true medicine, had not the counter medicine of the white man been hard at work. Inez was so wholly of the palefaces that she disdained an Indian. Let one but cross her ladyship to windward, and with squeal of protest she furnished notice of her displeasure. Inez had gotten the taint of that line of copper battle, and fled for refuge to Mr. Hanrahan’s saloon. It was her contempt for Indians, expressed on Mr. Hanrahan’s door, that brought out the ’Dobe Walls to defend its hair.
There was no such Eastern foolishness as a pane of glass in any of the buildings. The mud walls were perforated with openings eighteen inches square. These let in light and air. Also, they made portholes from which to shoot. Ten seconds after Mr. Masterson’s warning fusillade, two lynx-eyed gentlemen with buffalo guns were ready at each of those openings. They were a committee of reception likely to prove as warm as one might wish.
It is the vanity of the paleface to hold that he can whip twentyfold his weight in any alien race. He will prove this on the teeth of men red or yellow or black. No disaster drives this notion from his vainglorious pate. He believes it, and thereon he transacts his wars. Upheld by it, his steady, cool ferocity of heart, makes his enemies believe it also; and in the end they abandon him as the creature indomitable and above defeat. That cocky conceit of himself has gotten the paleface into uncounted trouble; and then brought him victoriously through it.
The twenty-one who waited with the buffalo guns were full-breathed specimens of their race. Wherefore, the fear of being beaten at the old game of war, which their fathers had played for a thousand years, never once crossed their slope of thought. They would cord up those flambuoyant savages; they would have a scalp to show and a new yarn to tell about their camp-fires. That was the most the coming trouble promised; looked on in that light, to repulse those savages was relaxation.
The charging Indians were a minute covering the space between those river cottonwoods and the ’Dobe Walls where the buffalo guns so hopefully awaited them.
Every charging buck wore on his bow arm a round shield of double buffalo hide. It had been stripped from the shoulder of a bull, and would stop the bullet from a common rifle. The oncoming buck covered himself with this bull’s-hide buckler. His quiver of arrows stood up above his left shoulder. As he charged, he would whip his right hand toward the quiver. Each time he brought away an arrow by the feather-end. With one motion the arrow was thrown across the bow; drawing it to the head, he sent it singing on like a hornet. The charging line of five hundred was preceded by an arrow-flight as thick as stubble, for these red experts shot so fast that the seventh arrow would leave the bow while yet the first was in the air. In that opening charge they did not employ rifles. At ranges not to run over one hundred yards the arrow would do as well. Every one of those missiles came twanging off the bowstring with a vengeful force that would have sent it smoothly, cleanly through a buffalo calf. And they must save their rifles for long range, should the war take on that shape.
“Billy,” said Mr. Masterson to Mr. Dixon, his comrade of the loophole, “I’m going to hive that big one on the pinto pony.” This to the end that Mr. Dixon pick out another target.
On came Mr. Masterson’s selection, shield held forward and arrows streaming from his bow like splinters of white light. Mr. Masterson’s finger, trained to wait instantly on his eye, unhooked his rifle the moment the shield showed through both sights. The great bullet struck the shield where the bunch of painted feathers floated. It went through bull’s-hide, arm, and savage shoulder behind the arm. The stricken one seemed to rise in the air like a kite; and then he struck the grass in a half-stunned heap to roll and clutch, and at last to lie still. Mr. Masterson snapped in another cartridge, and laughed cheerfully.
“Did you see the look of surprise, Billy,” asked Mr. Masterson, “on my Indian’s face? That was because he found his shield no good. The bullet went through as though the shield were brown paper, and disturbed that Comanche’s military theories.”
Mr. Dixon, whom Mr. Masterson addressed, made no response. He had piled up an Indian of his own, and was watching him with the keenest interest, with intent to send another bullet into him if he moved, which he didn’t.
As Mr. Masterson peered forth on the heels of the charge, he counted a round dozen of the Indians, scattered carelessly about, not one of whom would ride again. The buffalo hunters had been sedulous to aim low and to see their hind-sights before they pressed the trigger. With the dozen Indians were half as many ponies, kicking and tossing in the death-heave.
The volley broke the teeth of that charge; the Indians split on the buildings to right and left, as the stone piers of a bridge split the river’s ice in the spring. They flashed by and ran into the low hills, a third of a mile to the rear. After the charge, those Osage-Pawnee spectators, on their hill of curious peace, lighted pipes; they saw that the fight was to be a long one.
“Bat,” exclaimed Mr. Dixon, pointing to where Mr. Masterson’s Indian lay waving his one good hand for a sign, “your buck ain’t dead. Why don’t you drill him ag’in?”
“Let him alone,” returned Mr. Masterson. “It’s like baiting a trap. If he lives long enough, you and I by being sharp can kill a dozen over him, for his people will swoop down and try to carry him off.”
The big double door was the weak point. To strengthen it, Mr. Hanrahan tore loose the tall rum counter, and piled it across. This uncovered Inez, who for all her hot temper was timid and had crept behind the counter, regarding it as a cave of refuge in this trying hour. Stripped of her defences, Inez, who felt the peril though she might not understand, scuttled to the rear of the room and pushed in among a thicket of stools and poker tables, which had been thrown there to have them out of the way.
There was a lull, the Indians still hugging the hills. Taking advantage of it, Mr. Hanrahan sent round their morning whiskey to the people at the openings.
