Dead Shot; Or, The White Vulture: A Romance of the Yellowstone

by Albert W. Aiken

A moment the old hunter glanced along the shining tube, then a motion of his finger—crack! the sharp report of the revolver rung out on the stillness of the prairie—the savage stopped, trembled, clutched his breast with his hand convulsively and then fell forward on his face, dead—shot through the heart.

“Another Crow gone to kingdom come!” the guide muttered, coolly recharging the empty chamber of his revolver.

The two mounted Indians, seeing the fall of their comrade, hearing the sharp, whip-like crack of the revolver, and detecting the little puff of white smoke that curled upward from the ambush of the guide and floated lazily on the air above his head, instantly paused, then in a second flung themselves from their horses’ backs into the prairie-grass, where they nestled like so many snakes watching for their foe; their well-trained horses stood motionless. The party of five behind, who had also seen the fall of the foremost savage, quitted the backs of their horses and joined the two Indians concealed in the grass.

“Durn ’em!” ejaculated the hunter, “do they think that my rifle will carry to all creation?” for the Indians were far beyond rifle-range.

For some ten minutes there were no signs of life upon the prairie; the hunter remained motionless in his covert, watching for some movement upon the part of the foe, and the Indians remained quiet, their horses taking advantage of the occasion to graze upon the fresh young prairie-grass.

“What are they up to? Some deviltry, I’ll bet,” said the guide to himself. “Gosh! if they don’t make a movement soon, I shall have to, for the whole b’ilin’ of ’em will be up presently an’ I don’t calculate to fight a hundred of them all to onc’t. Hello! the fun’s commenced.” This remark was occasioned by the singular behavior of one of the Indian horses. As said, the animals had been feeding quietly upon the grass, but now one of the horses detached himself from the rest and proceeded to walk slowly away, taking a course that would describe a semicircle around the “Crow-Killer.”

He had fought the Indians too long to be deceived by this, one of the most common of their tricks. He knew that clinging to the horse and hid from his view by the body of the animal was one of the Crow warriors. Indeed, his keen eyes, trained from infancy to prairie-life, and possessing a range of vision wonderful in its extent, could detect the red hand of the warrior, where it clung to the horse’s mane, and the end of the foot of the Indian on the horse’s back.

The trapper and his horse were concealed from the view of the savages by a little clump of timber in the shape of a crescent, the ends of which rested on the river, so that when the Indian, concealed behind the horse, got abreast of the place where the guide was concealed, he was none the wiser regarding the hidden foe who had slain his comrade. The Indian behind the horse described a complete semicircle around the hiding-place of the “Crow-Killer,” and took a position just beyond rifle-range, by the river’s bank above him. Then the same maneuver was executed by three other savages, except that the first savage of the three stopped his horse within a few hundred yards of the Indian by the river’s bank, the second savage a few hundred yards from him, and the third Indian a few hundred yards from the second, so that by this maneuver the “Crow-Killer” was completely encircled on three sides by the Crows. The Yellowstone, there rapid and deep, cut off his escape on the only side left unguarded by the Indians.

“Wal, Abe, you’re in for it!” soliloquized the guide; “the red devils kinder think that they’ve got their beaver. If they’d only come within range, I’d pick ’em off one by one, but they ain’t a-goin’ to do that. Jerusalem! I’ve got to git out o’ this or they’ll lift my ha’r for me; the rest of the red suckers will be up pooty soon; then they’ll make a dash an’ close in onto me. I mought kill a few onto ’em, but in the end they’d wipe me out sart’in, an’ I don’t cal’late to let ’em do that jist yet. Hello, durned if they ain’t beginnin’ to close in on me already.”