'What, are they all asleep?' asked Snap.
'Better nor that, pard,' the old frontiersman chuckled; 'they're gambling for all they're worth; come along!' and, signing to them to follow, he glided away again from tree to tree, until at last the boys could see the red gleams of a camp-fire on the pines in front of them.
Another half-dozen yards and the whole scene was presented to their eyes. In a little hollow of grass burned the camp-fire, and in its light sat half a dozen Redskins in a group, three facing the other three. They were all squatting on their hams when Snap caught sight of them, and all chanting a kind of song which sounded like a witch's incantation more than like a decent expression of merriment, such as a song should be. The fire lit up their ugly faces, painted with bars of vermilion and black; gleamed on their long, snaky tresses, and glittered in their bead-like black eyes. Much to old Wharton's delight, too, it flickered back from a pile of rifles stacked under a pine a good twenty paces from the group of gamblers.
As the boys reached their point of view Buck Rabbit seemed the chief actor in the game. He had his back to them, but there was no fear of mistaking even his back, with its high, broad shoulders, heavy with knots and lumps of muscle, and that great bullet-shaped head, which seemed set right between them, with nothing but one great wrinkle of fat to show where the neck should be. His hands as they looked at him were the only moving things in the firelight, and they flitted and flashed backwards and forwards until you grew dizzy as you watched them, the old droning song rising and falling with the pace of the hands. The three men facing him had their eyes fastened on Buck Rabbit's hands all the while with an intensity which reminded the spectators of a cat watching a mouse or a snake trying to fascinate a bird. Suddenly, quick as a snake's stroke, one of the Indians opposite to Buck Rabbit shot out his arm and laid a long dark finger upon one of the chiefs hands. For a moment the song dropped. As his hand was touched Buck Rabbit stretched it out across the firelight, palm uppermost and empty! One of the three opposite to him without a word stooped down, and, taking one from a bundle of short sticks beside him, threw it across to Buck Rabbit's party, when the song again rose and the hands again dashed backwards and forwards in the firelight.
'I wonder, now, what that stick were worth? A blanket or a beaver-skin, you bet,' whispered Dick; 'or, may be, it's scalps they're playing for!'
'I don't understand the game,' answered Frank in the same low murmur.
'Oh, it's simple enough. That handsome old friend of ours has got a piece of bone in one of his hands. They've got to tell him in which hand it is. If they are right, he pays. If not, they do,' replied Dick. 'They'd go on at that game until this time to-morrow if we let them,' he added; 'but I guess we'll rise the winners this journey.'
'Now,' he whispered after a pause, 'you just be here and cover those Crows with your Winchesters. You, Snap, draw a bead on a spot about halfway between Buck Rabbit's shoulders, and you, Frank, cover that old villain with a little tuft of hair on his chin and only one eye. That's Teeveevex, the medicine-man, and the biggest scoundrel in the whole lot. If one moves before you hear me speak, fire and keep shooting as long as an Indian is left to shoot at.'
This last sentence the old man hissed out with an energy which impressed his hearers, and before it was well finished he had gone again. The boys could hear their hearts beat, and the only wonder to them was that the Indians could not hear them too, so loudly they seemed to thump against their ribs.
This time, it seemed, Teeveevex had been too many for old Buck Rabbit. His long, skinny claws clutched the chief's wrist like a vice, and when his palm was turned up the little ivory disc gleamed in it. All the shiny, evil-looking heads were bent together, when a voice rang out clear and hard in the stillness, 'Hands up! the man who moves dies!'