Stránka:book 1922.djvu/591

Campfire Stories of Indian Character S^i squaw from a buck. Lieutenant Cummings fell into % washout near the sawmill nearly atop of two Indians. They attacked him with knives, but he succeeded in killing both with his pistol — only to find that they were squaws ! The struggle was often hand-to-hand, and many of the dead were powder-burned. For a long distance the trail was strewn thick with bodies A sergeant and several men were pursuing two isolated fugitives who proved to be a buck and squaw. Suddenly the two fugitives turned and charged their pursuers, the buck armed with a pistol, the squaw with a piece of an iron stove! They were shot down. This running fight afoot continued for nearly a mile, when the troops, many of them already badly frozen, were hurried back to the garrison to get needed clothing and their mounts. [E. B. Bronson, who tells the tale, was in his ranch five miles away that night but the sound of firing at ten o'clock caused him to mount horse and hurry to the Fort with a friend.] Presently, nearing the narrow fringe of timber that lined the stream, we could see ahead of us a broad, dark line dividing the snow: it was the trail of pursued and pursuers — the line of flight. Come to it, we halted. There at our feet, grim and stark and terrible in the moonlight, lay the dead and wounded, so thick for a long way that one could leap from one body to another; there they lay grim and stark, soldiers and Indians, the latter lean and gaunt as wolves from starvation, awful with their wounds, infinitely pathetic on this bitter night in their ragged, half -clothed nakedness. We started to ride across the trail, when in a fallen buck I