The eagle's wing: A story of the Colorado

by B. M. Bower

Up on the ridge a couple of hundred yards before them, a man moved crouching behind a bush, came into the open, bent lower and peered downward. His actions were stealthy; his whole manner inexpressibly furtive. His back was toward them, and the ridge itself hid the thing he was stalking.

“He’s after a deer, maybe. Or a mountain sheep,” Rawley whispered, when the man laid a rifle across a rock and settled lower on his haunches.

“Still, it is well that we see what he sees,” Johnny Buffalo whispered back. “We will stalk him as he stalks his kill.”

The Indian squirmed his shoulder out of the strap sling that held his rifle in its case behind him. With seeming deliberation, yet with speed he uncased the weapon, worked the lever gently to make sure the gun was chamber loaded, and motioned Rawley to follow him.

In the hills the old man had somehow slipped into the leadership, and now Rawley obeyed him without a word. They stole up the side of the gulch where the man on the ridge could not discover them without turning completely around; which would destroy his position beside the rock and risk the loss of a shot at his game. He seemed wholly absorbed in watching something on the farther side of the ridge, and it did not seem likely that he would hear them.

A little farther up, a ledge cutting across the head of the gulch hid him completely from the two. An impulse seized Rawley to cross the gulch there and to climb the ridge farther on, nearer the spot which the man had seemed to be watching. He caught the attention of Johnny Buffalo, whispered to him his desire, and received a nod of understanding and consent. Johnny would keep straight on, and so come up behind the fellow.

Unaccountably, Rawley wanted to hurry. He wanted to see the man’s quarry before a shot was fired. So, when a wrinkle in the ridge made easy climbing and afforded concealment, he went up a tiny gully, digging in his toes and trying to keep in the soft ground so that sliding rocks could not betray him.

Unexpectedly the deep wrinkle brought him up to a notch in the ridge, beyond which another gully led steeply downward. Immediately beneath him a narrow trail wound sinuously, climbing just beyond around the point of another hill. He could not see the man up on the ridge, but he could not doubt that the rifle was aimed at some point along this trail. He was standing on a rock, reconnoitering and expecting every moment to hear a shot, when the unmistakable sound of voices came up to him from somewhere below. He listened, his glance going from the ridge to the bit of trail that showed farther away on the point of the opposite hill. The thought flashed through his mind that the man with the rifle could easily have seen persons coming around that point; that he must be lying in wait. Whoever it was coming, they must pass along the trail directly beneath the watcher on the ridge. It would be an easy rifle shot; a matter of no more than a hundred yards downhill.

He stepped down off the rock and started running down the steep gully to the trail. He was, he judged, fully a hundred yards up the trail from where the man was watching above. He did not know who was coming; it did not matter. It was an ambush, and he meant to spoil it. So he came hurtling down the steep declivity, the lower third of which was steeper than he suspected. Had he made an appointment with the travelers to meet them at that spot, he could not possibly have kept it more punctually. For he slid down a ten-foot bank of loose earth and arrived sitting upright in the trail immediately under the nose of a bald-faced burro with a distended pack half covering it from sight.

There was no time for ceremony. Rawley flung up his arms and shooed the astonished animal back against another burro, so precipitately that he crowded it completely off the trail and down the steep bank. Rawley heard the sullen thud of the landing as he scrambled to his knees, glancing apprehensively over his shoulder as he did so. There had been no shot fired, but he could not be certain that the small flurry in the trail had been unobserved.