THE STEAMBOAT REFUSES TO STOP
We ran to our horses, untethered and mounted them, and rode toward the grove as fast as we could make them lope along the steep, soft slope. The firing and yelling had ceased as suddenly as it had begun. I was almost trembling with anxiety. Was it possible that the enemy by a surprise attack had killed my uncle and all his men? Pitamakan, whose horse was the faster of the two, was in the lead. I belabored mine with heels and rope. When we quartered down to the river trail for the sake of the better going, the rise of the bluff ahead of us cut off our view of the grove and our camp. Then, as we neared the foot of the bluff, two of the enemy appeared on top of it.
"Our men are pursuing them! We've got them! Come on!" Pitamakan shouted back to me.
We were perhaps a hundred yards from the foot of the bluff, and on our right, about the same distance off, was the cutbank of the river. We rode on faster than ever and saw the two men crouch, one with ready bow and the other with pointed gun. Then, as we arrived at the foot of the slope, they suddenly sprang up and retreated out of our sight, and Pitamakan yelled again to me, "We've got them! Come on!"
Our horses panted up the slope, groaning and grunting their protests at every whack of our ropes. We topped the rise, and Pitamakan's horse shied at a couple of robes lying close to the trail. Beyond, a couple of hundred yards away, we saw my uncle and his men running toward us; he stopped at sight of us and signed, "Go out! They went down off the end of the bluff!"
We loped to the end of the bank and looked down. It was not a perpendicular bluff; it sloped to the river at an angle of about eighty degrees. Two fresh streaks in the dark and crumbling surface showed where the cut-throats had slid down into the water.
We looked out upon the swift-running river, but could not see the men. Presently they appeared in the center fully three hundred yards downstream, swimming swiftly and powerfully toward the far shore. We sprang from our horses in order to take steady aim at them, but both dived before we could fire. Holding our weapons ready, we watched eagerly for them to reappear. But, incredible as it may seem, we never saw them again until they emerged on the shore five hundred yards below. They turned and waved their arms at us derisively, and then slowly walked into the willows that lined the edge of the river.
"Oh, how disappointed I am! When they turned back from us there at the top of the rise, I was sure that I should soon count another coup," Pitamakan lamented.
We turned now to meet the men who were hurrying toward us and who were almost winded by their steep climb. "Where are they?" my uncle gasped.
"Across the river!" I answered.
I happened to look off at our camp. "A rider is at the barricade," I said.
"Abbott, no doubt, quieting the women," said my uncle, and added in Blackfoot so that Pitamakan would understand, "Well, they killed the Curlew! Shot him in the back of the head, poor fellow!"
"Poor Louis! His troubles are over," I said. I was sorry that we were never again to hear him bewailing in his falsetto voice the loss of his pension and his endless other worries.
My uncle went on to explain to us just what had happened. The Assiniboins had climbed out of the valley in plain view of us, leaving two of their number, who were probably near relatives of Sliding Beaver, to avenge the chief's death. Those two had lain concealed in the thick willows at the upper end of the chopping. Arriving in the timber, all of our men except Louis, who had gone farther up in the grove to trim and cut into proper lengths a cottonwood that he had previously felled, had begun loading logs on the wagons. Then a gun had boomed right behind Louis; he had toppled over, dead, and the two cut-throats had rushed out to scalp him. The men had fired and had driven them back into the willows before they had accomplished their purpose, and they had run toward the river trail with my uncle and some of his men after them.
It was evident that the two had not seen or heard Pitamakan and me ride past the head of the grove toward the river trail; we believed that it had been planned to kill as many of our men in the grove as they could, and to decoy us down the river, where we might be ambushed by the main party.
By the time we got back into the grove the men who had been left with the teams had dug a grave for poor Louis, and one of them had been to camp with the news of his passing. We buried him while his woman mourned for him and the other women cried in sympathy.
My uncle had the men knock off work early that afternoon so that the horses should have ample time to eat before we brought them into the stockade for the night. Then, while waiting for our evening meal, my uncle, Abbott, Pitamakan, and I held a war council out by the river-bank, where the men would not overhear our talk. They were a timid lot, French engagés all of them, and we did not want them to suspect how serious we thought our situation to be.
"The older I grow the less sense I have! I should have known better than to come down here with these few timid engagés to build a fort upon the most traveled war trail in the country," said my uncle. "I should have had ten—yes, twenty—more men. I shall send by the next up-river boat for all the men that can be engaged in Fort Benton."
"Yes, we are in a risky position," said Abbott. "This war party may be right back at us to-night; they may keep hanging round until they get more of us. If they have started home, they will be coming again as fast as they can get here with a big war party. We do need a lot more men, but I doubt whether even ten more can be engaged in Fort Benton."
"Far Thunder! Almost-brother! Listen to me!" Pitamakan exclaimed. "Not uselessly are we members of the Pikuni; we have but to let our people know what danger we are in, and a hundred of them will come to help us as fast as their horses can carry them. They are just two days' ride from Fort Benton at their camp on Bear River. Send for them, Far Thunder, and we will do our best to survive the dangers here until they join us."
"Ha! That is a life-saving plan you have in that good head of yours! I will get a letter about it ready right away; a steamboat may turn the bend down there at any moment! Carroll and Steell will lose no time in getting a messenger off to camp for us!"
"One more thing," Abbott interposed as my uncle rose to leave us. "If those cut-throats are going to sneak back into the grove again to-night and attack us, we have to know it. I propose that these two boys and I stand watch down there until morning."
My uncle agreed to that, and we went in to eat supper.
At early dusk Abbott, Pitamakan, and I went down into the grove, accompanied by all the men and women in a compact group. Then all the others turned back to camp. If the enemy were watching us from the breaks, they could not possibly count those who went to and from the grove, and so learn that three of us were remaining in it.
More than once during the night our hearts went thumpety-thump at the approach of dim and shadowy objects, but the objects always proved to be elk or deer. Pitamakan watched the river trail, I the breaks from the middle edge of the grove; Abbott had his stand at the upper end. Along toward morning I got a real scare when an animal that I thought was a stray buffalo proved to be a big grizzly coming straight toward me. I did not know what to do. If I ran, he would probably chase me; if I fired at him, I might only wound him—it was too dark to shoot accurately. I looked about for a tree small enough to climb, saw one, and was on the point of running to it, when the bear turned off sharply and I heard him slosh through the river.
We maintained our watch until my uncle came down with the men in the morning and stationed some of them to take our places. We thus had only six men at work; at that rate we should be all summer and winter building the fort! As we three were starting toward camp, my uncle told us that Tsistsaki was to stand watch there over the picketed horses and that we were to sleep as long as we could.
At about four o'clock in the afternoon, Tsistsaki roused us from our heavy sleep with the news that the smoke of a steamboat was in sight down the river. Springing from our couches and running outside, we saw the black column of smoke about two miles away, and I went down into the grove to notify my uncle. He hurried back to camp with me and got ready his letter to Carroll and Steell, and put it into a sack with a stone, so that he could throw it aboard; then we all went out to the bank of the river and waited for the boat to come in close at our hail. It presently rounded the bend a mile or more below and headed up the center of the broad, straight stretch. How interested I was in watching it, this freighter from far St. Louis! It had left the city only thirty or forty days before; what a lot we could learn of the news in the States if we could have a chat with its crew! I said as much to Abbott, and he exclaimed, "Oh, shucks! Who wants to know about the hide-bound, cut-and-dried, two-penny affairs and doings in the States! Here is where life is real life! Why, a fellow can get more excitement here in a day than in a lifetime back there!"
The steamboat came steadily on against the swift current, and as soon as it had passed the bar below the mouth of the Musselshell we fired several shots, and Pitamakan waved his blanket to attract the attention of the captain and the pilot; but the boat never changed its course, and after a few moments of anxious suspense my uncle exclaimed, "Is it possible that the captain does not intend to come in to us? Fire a couple more shots! Pitamakan, wave your blanket again."
We fired, waved our blanket and arms, and shouted. The crew on the lower deck and a few passengers on the hurricane deck came to the rail and waved greeting to us, and the man standing beside the pilot, evidently the captain, stuck his head out of the side window of the wheelhouse and looked at us, but still the boat held its course well over toward the farther shore; the captain intended to pay no attention to our signals. That he should not do so was almost unbelievable! My uncle turned red with anger. "The hounds! They are going to pass me! Me! A company man! That captain shall smart for this! Can you make out the name?"
I read the name on the wheelhouse. "It is the Pittsburgh," I told him.
"Ha! That explains it," he said. "It is not a company boat. This is its first trip up the river. The captain is sure a mean man; he will never get any of my custom!"
"But, Wesley, seems to me you've just got to get that letter aboard," said Abbott.
"Yes, I have to! It can be done, and it must! Thomas, Pitamakan, saddle up, you two, chase that boat, and when it ties up for the night—"
"I had better go with them, don't you think? There's no telling what they may run up against," Abbott said to him.
My uncle scratched his chin and frowned as he always did when perplexed, and after some thought exclaimed, "Well, I can't let the three of you go! The men down there in the timber are about as timid a set of sheep as ever was. No, Abbott, you'll have to help me here, and the boys must do the best they can."
Pitamakan ran for the horses. I did not ask whether I were to ride Is-spai-u; I just brought him in and put the saddle on him. Pitamakan saddled my runner, for, as you know, his fast horse had had his shoulder gashed by a bullet. My uncle handed me the letter and told us to be very cautious, but to get it aboard the boat at any cost. Tsistsaki came running out and handed us some sandwiches, and we were off.
The Upper Missouri Valley is the worst country in all the West for the rider. It is fine enough going in the wooded or grassy bottoms of varying lengths, but between the bottoms are steep slopes and ridges that break abruptly off into the winding river, and that are so seamed with coulees, many of them with quicksand beds, that they are well-nigh impassable.
I did not intend that we should follow the valley until obliged to do so. On leaving camp we rode on the plain and followed it from breakhead to breakhead. Occasionally we got a glimpse of the valley far below and of the smoke of the steamboat puffing its way up the river. We were soon in the lead of it, for, while we were making seven or eight miles an hour on a straight course, it was going no faster than that on a course as crooked as the body of a writhing snake. From the time we topped the rise above camp we were continually pushing into great herds of buffaloes and antelopes.
On and on we rode until the lowering sun warned us that we must keep close track of the progress of the steamboat. We turned down a little way into the breaks, looking for a well-worn game trail to follow, and soon found one. I never went along one of those bad-land trails without wondering how far back in the remote past it had been broken by a band of thirsty buffaloes heading down from the plains to water. Since that time how many, many thousands of them had traveled it!
When part way down the long incline, and still all of two miles from the river, we came to a sharp turn in the ridge, and from it saw the smoke of the steamboat, not, as we had expected, somewhere down the river, but all of three or four miles above the point where we should enter the bottom.
The sun had set, and the night was already stealing down into the valley; the boat would soon be tied up. There was not a pilot on the river that would venture to guide a steamboat up or down it even in the light of a full moon, and this night there would be no moon until near morning.
"Almost-brother, we have some hard traveling to do!" I said.
"We each have good legs. When our horses fail us, we will use them," Pitamakan answered.
The bottom that we were heading into proved to be all of a mile long, and we traversed it and went over a rather easy point into the next bottom before real night set in. We had starlight then, just enough light to enable us to see in a rather uncertain way forty or fifty feet ahead of our horses. Midway up the bottom we came to the first of our troubles, a cut coulee that ran across it from the bad lands to the river. We turned up along it almost to the slope of the valley before Pitamakan, on foot and leading his horse, found a game trail that crossed it. Presently we arrived at the point at the head of the bottom, and could find no trail leading up it, in itself a bad sign. We both dismounted and began the ascent. Our horses' feet sank deep into the sun-baked, surface-glazed volcanic ash with a ripping, crunching sound as if they were breaking through snow crust. Almost before we knew it we found ourselves on a steep slope with a cut bluff above us and the murmuring river below us. Our horses began to slip.
"We shall have to make a quick run for it!" Pitamakan called back to me.
The horses slipped and frantically pawed upward in a strenuous effort to avoid plunging down into the river. We made it and, gasping for breath, found ourselves upon the gently sloping ground of the next bottom.
"Almost we went into the river!" Pitamakan exclaimed.
"Don't talk about it!" I replied.
"The Under-Water People almost got us!"
"Oh, do be quiet! Mount and lead on, or let me lead!" I cried.
We went on up through that bottom, across a point, through another bottom and over a very rough point seamed with coulees. In the next bottom I called a halt. "The boat must be somewhere close ahead. We can no longer travel outside the timber; from here on we have to see both shores of the river—"
"It will be impossible for us to see the far shore," Pitamakan broke in.
"Of course. But the boat has lights burning all night long. We shall see them," I explained.
We mounted, and I took the lead into the timber close ahead. I let my horse pick his way, reining him only sufficiently to keep him close to the river and guiding myself by its sullen murmur. We groped our way through the timber of that bottom and of another; then from the next bare point we saw the lights of the boat some little distance up the river against the blackness of the north shore.
We rode through a belt of cottonwoods and some willows to the head of the bottom and then out upon a sandy shore right opposite the boat. White though it was, we could see nothing of it except its two lights, and they were so faint that we knew the river was of great width. We dismounted, and I told Pitamakan that I would fire my rifle to attract the attention of the watchman, and then shout to him, as loudly as possible, to send a small boat across for us.
I fired the shot; it boomed loudly across the water and echoed sharply against the other shore. "Ahoy, there! We want to come aboard!" I shouted, waited for an answer, and got none. Again I shouted, with the same result.
"Now you fire your rifle!" I told Pitamakan.
He fired it, and then we did get an answer. The flash of a dozen guns for an instant illuminated the white paint of the boat, and with the dull booming of them we heard several bullets strike in the trees behind us!