Читать книгу The Shaggy Legion - Hal G. Evarts - Страница 4

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Sue Carrolton heard the freighters attributing the stampede to Indians.

"But how could they know we were camped here?" she inquired of Coleman, her eyes sweeping the empty prairie.

It was most difficult for those unversed in plains travel and Indian customs to realize that every wagon train that traversed the regular overland trails was under constant surveillance. Without having revealed the least sign of their presence, scouts of the savages signalled every movement of every train, even where the view was unrestricted to the far horizon. Evidence of it was afforded by the fact that small outfits were suddenly attacked and overwhelmed. Larger caravans traveled without molestation or even alarm for as long as they went into corral at night, sent scouts ahead and out on either flank to guard against ambush at strategic points and made adequate provision for guarding their stock at every stop. But let the train boss of the largest outfit relax his vigilance after days or weeks of immunity and it was big odds that a few savages, mounted or afoot, would swoop like darting hawks and stampede the carelessly guarded stock, or that a war party would launch a vicious surprise attack upon the incautious train.

All this Coleman explained to Sue Carrolton. "That's why Flack's a good train boss," he said. "Flack don't savvy Injun sign or can't tell a war party from a squaw march; but he does know that Injuns spring from nowhere to run off stock at any moment, so at every camp he never fails to keep things well in hand."

The girl's eyes narrowed at this praise of Flack. She did not like the ruffianly train boss. Coming from a fighting strain herself, and reared among those whose lives were ordered by the blood code of warring feudal clans, she subscribed to the law of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Shooting down a member of some rival clan from ambush in retaliation for the death of a kinsman, even though the ambushed party had taken no personal part in the demise of said relative, seemed right and just to her. Accustomed to men of violence and swift action, she nevertheless despised the sheer animal brutality which led Flack to crush men to a bloody pulp at the slightest provocation. Also, she knew that the burly train boss looked upon Coleman with unfriendly eye.

"He don't mean any good to you," she warned.

"He don't mean good to any man," Coleman said. "No reason why Flack would be fond of me—nor hold against me more than the dislike he shows for all folks."

The girl, with her more intimate feminine insight into such matters, had not failed to observe Flack's admiration for herself. She had not the slightest doubt that her own preference for Coleman was at the bottom of Flack's ill-concealed animosity toward the plainsman.

"Keep an eye out for him," she counselled.

Coleman nodded. It had been his constant habit since infancy to keep an eye out for everything.

Half a hundred buffalo carcasses dotted the prairie in the immediate vicinity. The freighters cut off such meat as they desired. The pilgrims welcomed this addition to scanty larders and each family dressed out several quarters of meat to be stowed in the wagons. Gilroy's squaw and children were busily engaged in salvaging meat in preparation for drying it. The oxen had been released again to graze under guard.

An hour before sundown Coleman moved over to the Carrolton wagons and pointed to the north.

"Here they come—the Cheyennes," he said to Sue.

The girl trained her eyes in that direction and made out a multitude of tiny moving specks that grew larger and more colorful as they drew near. She watched the vivid scene with interest. Half a hundred warriors arrived first, their ponies skimming the prairies. They dismounted round the post. Behind came a swarm of squaws and children. Half-grown boys herded a band of loose ponies, many of them bearing packs. The squaws led or drove a hundred or more horses behind which travois poles trailed on the ground, laden with personal belongings. Children from three to five years of age were tied to the saddles of ponies that traveled with the herd. The youngsters seemed to experience no inconvenience from the gait of the horses, even when they reared or shied. Older children rode with the grace and fearlessness exhibited by their elders.

The conclave halted two hundred yards downstream. Squaws caught and unpacked the horses. Travois poles served for lodge poles and in an incredibly short space of time a village sprang up along the creek. Twenty-odd teepees stood there, the coverings of dressed buffalo hides painted in crude designs. Smoke soon ascended from the teepee vents.

The bucks had crowded round outside the post. To each in turn Gilroy passed a small drink of alcohol diluted with water, the usual trade liquor of the West.

No less a personage than Little Beaver, a noted war chief of the Northern Cheyennes, headed the party. He had been one of the leading figures in the recent peace conference wherein representatives of the Great White Father and the head chiefs of the northern plains tribes again had agreed to bury the hatchet for as "long as the sun rises in the East and the water runs down hill." Little Beaver had become an adept at promising with the easy facility which he had learned from the white men. Long experience had taught him that the white men made promises only to violate them. Consequently, he had adopted similar tactics. He promised readily enough, then, and knowing that white men would be killing buffalo and invading new boundary lines within the week, he anticipated them and violated the treaty first by lifting a few casual scalps at the earliest opportunity.

"Thought you'd just made peace, and now you stampede a buffalo herd onto the first train that passes through!" Flack growled.

Little Beaver did not like the expression on the countenance of the wagon boss and he asked Coleman to interpret the speech.

"The wagon chief asks if Little Beaver was at the peace conference," Coleman hedged.

"Little Beaver was there. There is but one trail. That is the white man's road. Little Beaver has set his feet upon it. It is smooth and easy walking. Never shall his feet stray from that path and lead him into rough ground. Henceforth the Cheyennes will follow the white man's road." That was the expression by which all plains Indians conveyed the meaning that they intended to emulate the example of the whites in all things. "The Cheyennes are anxious now to live in big lodges of logs like the white men. We are weary of moving about and would stay always in one spot. We will plow the ground and raise corn and tame buffalo. We are anxious to start. The Cheyennes follow the white man's road."

Coleman interpreted this oration to Flack. Aside, to Bridger, he said: "He's an amiable old liar and will lift the hair of the first pilgrim he can catch off guard."

Several of the Cheyennes recognized Coleman. He assented to some proposition that these acquaintances put to him and the freighters watched curiously as he stepped back eight paces from the stockade while a Cheyenne marked a four-inch circle on the log wall. Numerous bets were placed. Coleman drew the heavy knife from his belt and hurled it without apparent aim or effort. It landed point first in the circle and quivered there. He performed the feat several times.

"It's balanced to make one turn in twelve feet, two turns in twenty-four, and land point first," he explained to a freighter who had inquired. "Injuns balance their tomahawks to make a turn in so many feet when they heave 'em."

The Cheyennes demanded more liquor. Rapaho Gil shook his head.

"I will trade high-wine for robes," he said.

However, he tendered the Cheyenne chief a drink. Haughtily, Little Beaver refused to partake.

"The firewater of the white men makes my people crazy!" he said fiercely. "They trade off their robes and their furs and the next day have nothing." He swept his arm to indicate the dead buffalo scattered round the prairie. "The white men come into the country of the red men and kill our buffalo."

"There are so many buffalo that they will never grow few," old Gil answered in the Cheyenne tongue.

"So in my youth the first white men said of the beaver," the chief returned. "We believed it then. But for thirty summers the whack of the beaver's tail upon the water has not been heard in the land of the Cheyennes. Soon the buffalo will follow the trail of the beaver and the bellies of the Cheyennes will be empty with hunger. The white men must stop killing the buffalo that belong to my people."

He harangued his braves, urging them to trade only for ammunition. A few tentative trades were made for powder and ball. Loudly, one warrior demanded liquor. He snatched off the robe that covered him and tendered it to Rapaho Gil. The trader in return gave him two pints of the diluted liquor.

The prevailing price for years had been one pint of diluted alcohol for one buffalo robe. So universal had this practice become that for a quarter of a century buffalo robes had been known as "pints" to red man and white alike.

"No more," Rapaho Gil said regretfully to Coleman. "It's a quart for a robe nowadays. Twice as much as I paid twenty year ago and I sell a robe for half the price I got for one in them days. The robe trade is blowed up."

The Cheyenne quaffed half his liquor on the spot, tendering the rest to his fellows. A few more similar trades were made. Then the Cheyennes rode down to the camp that had been prepared by the squaws. A continuous stream of savages plied between camp and post, bringing in finely dressed robes and carrying the "high-wine" back to camp. By midnight the whole Cheyenne camp was in a drunken uproar. Squaws and children screeched in abandon and warriors recited their valorous deeds without the usual audience. Before dawn the Cheyennes were robeless and the trader's stock of liquor was running low. In the morning, a few squaws and braves came to the wagon camp to beg for sugar and trinkets. But when the bull train moved out, the majority of those in the Cheyenne camp still were sleeping off the effects of their night-long debauch.

Some weeks later Coleman turned from the regular trail and led the train northward through trackless country. They had left the short-grass prairies far behind and now traversed sage-clad plains and foothills with occasional higher ranges covered with a sparse growth of stunted juniper.

Coleman scouted the country ahead to pick the most feasible route. Also, he killed game when opportunity offered. Scarcely a day passed but what he dropped elk, mule deer, buffalo, antelope, bighorn sheep, or bear, leaving the animals where they fell to be picked up by the following train. And always, of course, he kept his eye peeled for Indian signs.

Sue Carrolton borrowed a mule one day and rode ahead with him. He pointed out to her presently an Indian trail. "Not a war party," he said. "It's a Crow village on the move. The sign's more'n two weeks old."

"How do you know all that just from looking at the tracks?" the girl inquired.

"First off, this is Crow country. It was a big party—hundreds of 'em; and the travois marks prove it was a village on the move, or at least a big band traveling with their squaws and children and personal effects. A war party don't travel with travois or take their families along. And no other nation would move a village into Crow country. At least it ain't likely. But to cinch the point, the cast-off moccasins along the trail are of Crow make. The squaws of different tribes use different seam patterns and different trimmings in making moccasins. The last rain was two weeks back and this trail has been rained on."

"You know so much about those things," the girl murmured.

"Sure I do. It's my business to know. Any pilgrim can tell the difference between a village picnic and a regiment of soldiers. Well, I know a war party from a squaw march when an Injun village is shifting camp. Settlement folks know a church meeting from a horse race by the sound. And I can tell two mile off whether an Injun village is feasting, scalp dancing or wailing for their dead. Any pilgrim or bullwhacker can tell the difference between a horseshoe and a muleshoe at first glance. And me, I can just as easy distinguish between the moccasins of different tribes. Most folks can tell Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Spaniards and so on apart. And a plainsman knows a Sioux from a Mandan and a Piute from a Cheyenne just as easy. That's all there is to it, Sue."

"Why do the Indians call you the Little Mandan?" the girl made inquiry, her eyes traveling over his six feet of length.

"Account of a grandpap o'mine, Hunter Breckenridge. Breckenridge is my first name—Breck for short. He lived among the Mandans for a spell and later among the Pawnees. He was quite a figure, they tell me, in the days of the fur brigades, and they called him the Big Mandan. My mother was his oldest daughter. She'd not quite turned fifteen yet when she married my dad back in Missouri and started out over the trail with the front end of the Oregon emigrants. I was born on the trail and my folks both died on the way. I was raised in a trading post on the Snake River. When the old-time traders and trappers told the Injuns who my kinsfolk was, they used to come to see me and called me Little Mandan."

"Some of my kin lived among the Indians, too—my great-grandfolks," the girl told him. "Rod Buckner, the old man's name was. He married a white girl that was a captive in the Shawnee towns—White Fawn, they called her—and come west of the Mississippi when Boone and the woodsmen left Kentucky."

Both felt a certain sense of fellowship in thus having sprung from strains that similarly had thrust ever deeper into the wilderness. It seemed somehow to cement a bond between them. Neither could put it into words. The girl essayed it when she said, "And here's my folks and me still pushing on. Seems like you and me spring from a restless breed. What'll our sort o' people do when there's no new places left to go?" And she laughed lightly at her own flight of fancy.

Coleman, however, did not laugh. Instead, he glanced at her, startled at her voicing of the thought that had been taking vague shape in his own mind for several years. Young as he was, he had seen the day when the greater part of the West was the undisputed domain of the red men. The Oregon emigrants and the California stampeders had held to the established trails while everything for hundreds of miles on either side of those highways had been the great unknown to all save roving bands of trappers, who, of course, had known the country intimately even then. But now matters changed with increasing rapidity every year. California had been settled. Oregon was being settled up with great rapidity. The Mormons had settled Utah. The mining excitement in Montana had lured many thousands to that far-off spot. Rich strikes in Arizona and New Mexico had caused a rush of miners to those parts, the discovery of the Comstock Lode had drawn frenzied swarms of people to Nevada, while other gold seekers poured across the Kansas prairies to the mountains of Colorado. A long line of settlements had been thrust the length of the Missouri. Settlers pressed south and west through Kansas and north through Texas. Army posts, pony express and overland stage stations had sprung up everywhere. Freighting across the plains in all directions had increased to monumental proportions. And still they came in increasing swarms—settlers, soldiers, hunters, freighters, miners, gamblers and adventurers. Railroads were coming too, pushing slowly across Kansas. There was talk of steel rails that would connect the Pacific with the Mississippi. They were even driving big herds of cattle up from Texas to Baxter Springs, Kansas, and Southwest Missouri.

"What you thinking about?" Sue Carrolton inquired.

"That what you said was true—about soon there'd be no new place left for restless breeds o' folks like ours to go," he said.

The girl laughed gaily. "I didn't say soon," she corrected, waving a hand to indicate the vast scope of country round them. "We haven't seen a human in ten days. This country right here is new, and will be for a long time yet."

Coleman shook his head and related to her the opposite thoughts that had been cruising through his mind.

"It's coming sooner than you think," he prophesied. "I was born out here and I've seen this country filling up."

"Then what?" she asked. "When that time does come?"

This time it was Coleman who chuckled at his own flight of fancy. "Then you and me'll have to backtrack along the trails our kinsfolk blazed out for us," he said. "We'll head east, maybe, as they headed west. That'll be new country to us, Sue. I never yet set foot as far east as the Mississippi."

Even as they conversed, Coleman's eyes roved over the country ahead and to either side. No detail escaped his eye. Constant wariness was as natural to him as to a panther in some country that swarmed with hunters. A lifetime of experience had taught him that the most peaceful-appearing landscape might harbor a thousand ambushed braves; that days and weeks of immunity from attack might mean but the lull before the cyclone. Those who permitted vigilance to be relaxed and allowed themselves to lapse into a sense of false security did not wear their hair for long.

"Anyway, the Crows haven't discovered yet that we're traveling through their country," the girl remarked.

Coleman grunted dissentingly. Even then, he was observing smoke puffs that ascended from a distant range of hills. For three days now he had been observing them. "They know." He pointed to a wisp of smoke that rose from a mountain in the distance. "The news has been signalled to every village. Crow scouts are watching every move we make. They're holding powwows and medicine chats all through the whole Crow nation. The braves of every village are in council. They just haven't decided on their course yet. We'll run foul of them before long. The very fact that a bunch of them haven't dropped in with their squaws to visit round and beg is proof that they haven't made up their minds yet. But they know all about us. Don't fool yourself."

They had been riding more slowly, the gait intentional on Coleman's part, as he had no wish to ride too far ahead of the train in company with the girl. Despite the uninterrupted absence of Indians for ten days past—or perhaps because of it—he knew that an ambush was an hourly possibility. The stunted sage afforded ample cover from which a thousand painted braves might spring at any instant. The Crows, firm friends of the whites since the days of Lewis and Clark, long had prided themselves upon the fact that the Crows never had taken a white man's scalp. But of late years, since the prospectors, taking advantage of Crow hospitality, had invaded their mountain habitat in numbers while hunters shot down the buffalo in the lower valleys, there had been brushes of minor importance. The Crows knew that wherever a wagon train broke trail, highways of travel soon would follow. Would they permit this train to leave its tracks through their country unmolested? Coleman doubted it. He dropped back to within a few yards of the lead wagon.

"I've got to skirmish on ahead a piece," he said. "You fall back with the train."

Flack, as Coleman had stated, was an efficient wagon boss. Engrossed with his responsibilities in crossing through this virgin country, he had, apparently, laid aside his quarrel with Coleman. The freighters knew him better than to believe, however, that this amnesty was more than temporary. Watching Coleman riding ahead with the girl, Flack's jealous temper flared. He rode ahead on his mule.

"I heard somewheres that you was supposed to be scouting for this outfit," he said to Coleman with manifest truculence.

"Yes," Coleman assented.

"Well, sitting here on your horse and gabbing with a girl ain't scouting, way I look at things."

"No? Well, you ain't supposed to know much about scouting, whatever way you look at things," Coleman said. "But anyway, I was just about to skirmish on over that next low pass."

He turned his horse and rode on ahead. Flack scowled after him. Sue Carrolton had been treated to various demonstrations of Flack's brutality. An involuntary shudder passed through her as she pictured Coleman being hammered and kicked to a bloody wreck as those others had been.

"I'll teach him his business if he stays with a bull train that I'm bossing!" Flack asserted.

"He knows his business," the girl retorted.

"Yeah? Then let him 'tend to it," Flack said.

The girl favored him with a scornful glance and dropped back to ride beside the Carrolton wagons midway of the train. The wagons wound their slow way up the slope and crossed through the saddle in its crest. Far ahead was a tiny moving speck that Sue knew was Coleman riding on across the sea of sage.

She rode ahead with him again for an hour or two the following day. Watching the pair of them, Flack's temper did not improve. He was in an ugly mood when the girl dropped back to join the train. Round noon she looked ahead and saw Coleman, a toy figure in the distance, riding in the center of a five-mile-wide bottom. He reined in his horse and dismounted. When, an hour later, the bull train reached that point, it was to find him waiting there beside a tiny creek.

"Thought maybe you'd want to stop over here till sundown, rest and feed the stock and make a night march of it to the next water," Coleman said to Flack. "There's no water ahead for twenty-five miles or better."

"There'd ought to be water over that next rise," Flack objected.

"Yes. There'd ought to be. But there's not," Coleman returned. "I've been all through here. That next rise ain't the crest of a divide. It's the start of a twenty-mile sloping dry bench."

"We'll go on and see for ourselves," Flack said.

Coleman shrugged his indifference. He dropped back to the Carrolton wagons and said to Sue, "Pass me out your water keg."

He filled the small wooden cask at the creek, rode on to overtake the train, balancing the heavy keg before him, and handed it into the wagon. Then he rode on in advance. The wagon train attained to the rise but instead of the usual dip beyond, the view consisted of a gradually rising stretch of country that merged with the distant sky. Flack knew then that he had been in error. The knowledge served only to increase his rancor toward Coleman.

Throughout the afternoon and on until close to midnight, they crept across the arid bench. Then the weary animals could go no farther without rest. A halt was called and the train made a dry camp. The bawling of thirst-tormented oxen beat up against the ears of those who tried to sleep. In the early dawn, Flack gave the order to break camp.

Coleman filled his hat with water from the Carrolton's keg and carried it to his horse, then made a second trip.

"Think your horse has special privileges over what the other critters have, so's he's entitled to use folk's drinking water?" Flack demanded, chewing savagely upon a juniper stick.

Coleman turned for a moment and looked at him. The wagon boss did not like what he saw in Coleman's eyes. Plainsmen, he knew, were an uncertain quantity. One might stand up and take his medicine with fists and feet, no matter how terrible the treatment. The next might have a scalping knife or a bullet into an opponent the second that trouble started. Flack, while endowed with abundant animal courage to carry him through the most savage physical encounter, was not equipped with that quality which permitted a man to face another with a naked knife or gun with the life of one or the other as the stakes. Coleman must realize the fact that Flack could kick him into a senseless heap in a brace of minutes. Yet the train boss sensed the fact that Coleman had not the least fear of him. Did that lack of fear mean that Coleman was prepared to kill him if he forced the issue? Some way, the steely points of light in Coleman's eyes just now reminded Flack of the steel point of that knife which the plainsman hurled so accurately. Coleman shook the remaining water from his hat, placed it on his head and turned away.

Flack knew that the freighters had observed and commented among themselves upon the clash of wills existing between himself and Coleman. He could not afford to let matters stand as they were. The freighters would assume that he feared Coleman unless he administered a beating such as he dealt out to all others who crossed him. He must figure out some way to pass the whole thing off as a joke.

Bawling oxen were being yoked, mules harnessed and hooked to wagons. Some of the thirst-tortured animals were unruly. Coleman, having saddled, was in the act of mounting. Flack saw his chance. The long lash of his bull whip curled above the backs of an intervening yoke of oxen and the tip of the lash bit into the horse's rump with a vicious report. The startled beast gave a mighty leap, hung his head between his forelegs and pitched across the sage. Coleman, half in the saddle, managed to gain his seat and ride the animal out.

Flack laughed uproariously, "I overshot the mark," he shouted. "I missed that ornery bull and touched up Coleman's horse."

The freighters would know that it was no accident. Flack's skill with a bull whip was too precise. If he could pass it off to Coleman as an accident, without the latter making an issue of it, the joke would be on the plainsman. Flack could laugh it off and thereafter act in more jovial fashion toward Coleman, avoiding further clash of wills.

Coleman had brought his horse under partial control. Flack still laughed uproariously. Then the grin froze on his face as he observed that Coleman's attention was divided. Even while attempting to quiet the animal, Coleman's eyes remained on the train boss. The gray of them seemed hard as moss agate. He headed the horse, still prancing nervously, straight toward Flack. His right hand dropped to the hilt of that heavy knife in his belt instead of to the big "navy" revolver. Flack essayed a grin.

"I overshot my mark," he laughed.

"I won't overshoot mine," Coleman promised grimly. The knife slid from its sheath.

Flack fancied that Coleman's eyes held something of the same wild light that he had seen in the eyes of outlaw horses. But even as he stared back into them in a species of fascination, Flack sensed a swift change in them. Coleman's gaze, instead of boring into Flack's eyes, apparently had become fastened upon a point some two feet above the latter's head. The wide-eyed stare was transformed into a narrowed regard while the tense knife arm relaxed. Stupidly, Flack wondered at this swift transition. Then Coleman's voice cut sharply across his daze.

"They're onto us!"

He gestured with the deadly knife and Flack turned to peer behind him in the direction indicated. The gray sage stretched away to the far horizon.

"Injuns!" Flack bellowed suddenly. A mile away and spread out over a broad front, hundreds of mounted warriors were riding swiftly toward the train. Fortunately, the train had not yet broken corral formation. Instantly, Flack became again the efficient train boss.

"Bulls inside!" he roared. "All stock to the center and take your posts!"

In an incredibly short space of time the stock had been led inside the wagon corral. Freighters and pilgrims alike were stationing themselves to repel the impending onslaught of the savages. Flack's big voice boomed everywhere above the turmoil.

The Indian advance was now within a quarter of a mile. The vague moving tangle had resolved itself into a colorful panorama. Ponies of every conceivable color and pinto pattern stood out individually in the early morning light. Gaudily painted shields and resplendent war bonnets flashed in the rays of the rising sun. A woman screamed hysterically from an Ohio emigrant wagon. From within one of the Carrolton wagons the ailing mother coughed hollowly.

The savages came to a sudden halt three hundred yards away and the warriors pressed into huddled groups. Coleman estimated their numbers at more than half a thousand.

"Now!" Flack said. "We'll pour it to them while they're bunched up thataway. They ain't yet larned the range o' these new Spencers. Once we've poured a few volleys through that cluster they'll know better than to do anything worse than swoop round half a mile away and yelp."

"Wait!" Coleman said. Within the limit of his experience, Flack was right. The war parties of the plains tribes that haunted the regular overland trails usually contented themselves with feint attacks, stampeding of stock or lifting a few scalps from the heads of careless stragglers when a surprise could not be effected. They seldom pressed home an attack in the face of determined opposition. But such war parties chiefly were out for sport and easy plunder. This case was most decidedly a different matter. If the Crow council had decided that the crossing of this wagon train was a menace to their country, the whole Crow nation would rise to contest its passing. It would not consist of mere tentative skirmishes, but instead of desperate onslaughts, ambushes at every strategic point, nightly efforts to stampede, kill or cripple stock.

"Wait, Flack," Coleman insisted. "They ain't quite decided whether to fight or palaver."

"How can you tell that?" Flack demanded. "They're betwixt us and water and they're out for hair."

"Yes—if it comes to an issue. But if the Crow council had been unanimous for war, they wouldn't have come riding at us across the open this way when we're in corral and ready to receive 'em," Coleman pointed out. "They'd have surprised us at daybreak without warning or ambushed us at some bad point while we were on the march."

Flack grunted skeptically. A lone warrior spurted from among his fellows, rode furiously to within a hundred yards of the train, flung himself on the off-side of his pony and dashed away, righting himself to look back and indulge in derisive gestures.

"Young buck showing off his courage," Coleman said. A second brave emulated the example of the first. "I'll ride on out and hold a medicine chat."

Flack felt certain that any man who rode out there was taking his life in his hands. He would experience the opposite of grief if Coleman failed to return.

"All right," he growled. "You think you know." Gripping her father's fowling piece, Sue Carrolton kept her eyes upon the savage throng. Beside her, in his hands an ancient flintlock, her oldest brother, Buckner Carrolton, not yet turned twelve years of age, cursed in excited whispers and threatened dire vengeance against the painted warriors of the Crows. The elder Carrolton, stationed with his long Kentucky rifle in the opening between the next two wagons, spat copiously sidewise without removing his gaze from the enemy. From within the wagon there came again that hollow, racking cough and Sue's quick concern and sympathy went out to the woman who reposed there on a corn-husk pallet. Then suddenly the girl's heart skipped a beat and seemed to turn cold and heavy within her. Coleman was riding out alone toward that savage throng. His horse was performing in peculiar fashion, with apparent aimlessness. The animal advanced obliquely to the left for a few yards, then swung to a right oblique, veered again to the left and continued its zigzag course toward the enemy. Was Coleman asleep in the saddle, or was he sick and unable to control his horse? She did not learn until later that this zigzag advance of a lone rider was the universal sign by which one side or the other announced its desire for a conference among all plains tribes. As she watched, a warrior swept forward alone on a splendid black-and-white stallion. A streamer of blood-red cloth dangled from his lance head. His bull-hide shield bore some heraldic device in bright greens and yellows. A gorgeous war bonnet of eagle feathers trailed behind upon the rump of his flashy horse. Was this to be a single-handed combat? She saw Coleman rein in his horse and lean from the saddle. He placed his rifle upon the ground, then removed the navy revolver from his belt along with his scalping knife. These were deposited with his rifle. The Crow chief also had leaned to place upon the ground his musket, bow, quiver of arrows, tomahawk and scalping knife. Then the two rode on to meet midway between the savages and the corralled wagons of the bull train.