Before I leave this incident, I want to call attention to the result of our attack, as we afterward learned the details from the Cheyennes themselves. We had fired fourteen shots. These killed six men outright and wounded eleven others. The explanation is simply that the drunken Indians, shooting off their guns at random in the first attack, sent some of their bullets into one another. I distinctly remember seeing one fellow, at whom we had not fired, leap up from the grass with a shout and fall back again, groaning.
INTO THE RED MAN’S CAMP
I said that at the end of our day’s run we lay down to rest, completely fagged. After half an hour, when I was sound asleep, I was wakened by Chuck Morris, standing up from his blanket. I saw him go to the gray mare and begin to work over her patiently, steadily. It made me wonder to see him.
“Is she sick?” I asked him.
“She’s getting her rubdown,” he answered. “And she’s earned it.”
I got up without another word and went to the brown. Not that I knew anything of the fine art of rubbing down a horse, but at least I could wipe the sweat off the poor beast. I found him, standing with his head down, trembling with the cold of the night coming on, and only making an occasional nibble at the buffalo grass. He had the look of a sick horse. He was sick, and another day of following that streak of gray lightning which Morris had between his legs would have killed the gelding beyond a shadow of a doubt. I worked over it until I had whipped the thickly beaded sweat out of its hair and brought a bit of a glow to the surface. I worked until it gathered itself together a bit and went ahead industriously with its feeding. Then I heard Morris’s voice, speaking low. All men, except the fools, speak low on the prairie.
“A good many more would rather have walked tomorrow than worked over their nags tonight. But you and me are going to ride, Lew, and maybe we’ll have to ride. Those red devils will be after us, I think.”
“They’ve had enough of us,” I said. “Besides, haven’t you told me that they rarely stay with a trail very long?”
“That crowd is different,” said Chuck. “They’re all picked men.”
“How could you tell that?”
“You’re like others. God gave you eyes, but He didn’t give you the sense to use ‘em. Didn’t you see that every man in that gang had a good rifle?”
“What of that?”
“I’ll tell you what. The majority of the Indians have three bows to every gun, and their guns are mostly old flintlock muskets, no good at all. But these bucks had rifles… every one of them had a rifle. Lew, I tell you that they’re the pick of the whole Cheyenne nation.”
“Are they Cheyennes?” I asked.
This was too much for Chuck. He gave up on me in disgust and turned back to his blanket, though he really could not have expected me to know a Cheyenne from any other of the Indians. But he had been reading the prairie language for so many years that he could not understand those who lacked the same knowledge. I had to wait until morning to ask any more questions, and in the morning there wasn’t much time for talk. I was still deeply asleep when Chuck prodded my shoulder with the toe of his boot.
“Get up,” he said. “It’s morning.”
“You be damned! It ain’t more’n midnight. Besides, I’d rather be scalped than wake up now.”
I can still remember the agony of that waking. Chuck simply walked away without arguing. For the prairie kind never wasted their words; they spoke once and went about their business. It was a habit I never acquired. I always enjoyed talk, and the Indians could never grow accustomed to my garrulity. It was Chuck’s silence that told me he meant business. I dragged myself into a sitting posture and saw there was only the faintest sort of a gray rim in the east. But even that had been enough for Chuck. Winter and summer, at that moment in the day he always wakened. And as soon as the sun went down he grew dull and sleepy. He seemed to need the sun, and he seemed to respond to it as flowers do.
We saddled the horses at once. The gray mare was as frisky and happy as though she had not carried a rider a mile in a fortnight. I was beginning to understand from her the value of symmetry in a horse. These hulking monsters are not necessarily the great weight carriers. There was the gray that had been flaunting along with Morris’s two hundred pounds as though it was a feather. And yet she was really a small horse. I don’t think that she stood more than fifteen hands and one or two inches. But she was made with a wonderful neatness and aptness that gave her strength where she needed strength. I looked at her with wonder and with delight this morning. For that matter, the brown had come through the struggle astonishingly well. But there was simply no comparison between the two.
Five minutes later, as the dawn brightened and spilled from the horizon across the faintly rolling waves of the prairie, we were riding for our lives again. I saw nothing. My eyes were still filmed with sleep, and I was sick for the want of it when Morris brought me to my senses with a cruel jerk.
“Cheyennes!” he said.
I sat my saddle, while Morris was already scudding away. I thought for a chilly instant that he intended to ride right away from me, he was so seriously bent on jockeying the gray along. Then I saw the Cheyennes. There were nine of them in sight, four whooping in on the right and five on the left, beating and kicking their nags along. They could do nothing with Morris, of course, and even my brown was too much for them. Indeed, the astonishing thing about Indian horseman ship was always the great average speed of a large body. One hundred Indians would travel twice as fast as one hundred ordinary mounted white men. But, individual against individual, I don’t think that they either rode as well or raced as well as a white man.
At a certain point in the chasing they were apt to smell blood and stop thinking. And thinking’s what one should be doing all the time, whether it’s whittling a piece of wood or reading a book or shooting a gun. One should be thinking hard of what one is doing. Perhaps that sounds like Mother Goose wisdom, but too many men in these days are giving one half of themselves to their work, and with the other half of their brain they are wondering how the accounts of their greatness will appear in the newspapers. While I was riding to put myself out of reach of those nine Cheyennes, I was not thinking of what would happen if they caught me, or how a scalping knife would feel against my skull as I lay half dead on the ground. I was thinking of only one thing, and that was how to put the brown through the gap in time.
Chuck Morris now looked back and brought the gray beside me. It was a very fine thing. He could have shot the mare through to an easy escape, but he preferred taking that terrible chance at my side.
“God bless you, Chuck!” I shouted at him, with tears stinging my eyes.
He did not even hear me, he was so busy watching the Indians, and now his hand began to fumble eagerly at his rifle. It was a beautiful thing to see him. To keep the mare at the brown’s speed required no effort from him. He simply dropped the reins and rode her with his heels and his knees, leaving both his hands free. He sat very erect, with the wind whistling under his hat and combing his yellow hair out behind his head. He was smiling, too, in a sort of devilish, happy way that said as plain as day that he loved the danger more than he loved his life.
We flew past them. Then they straightened out behind us until they came to the next little hummock of ground. There they halted, dropped on their bellies on the ground, and began to take pot shots at us. However, I almost fear bows and arrows more than I fear an Indian’s gun. They simply are not natural marksmen, and the exceptions are mighty few and far between. There seems to be a desire in them to close the eyes as they pull the trigger.