'Are you through there?' cried the voice again.
'Yes,' cried Frank.
'All the rifles broke, mine loaded, the Indian free and armed, and the cartridges pouched?' he inquired again.
'Yes, Dick,' they replied.
'Very well; now keep your rifles ready if they try to rush me,' said Wharton, and then added, to the figures by the fire:
'Now, gentlemen, I'll not detain you any longer; you can skip;' and, dropping his revolver, he turned on his heel and joined the boys. As he did so a report rang out, and then another. The next moment Dick Wharton had wrenched the smoking rifle from the hands of the Indian whom Snap had released; but it was too late, one of the gamblers had a bullet through his skull, and the great hare-lipped chief himself reeled for a moment as the second bullet cut through the muscles of his arm. With a curse, however, he recovered himself, and, dripping with blood, followed his comrades into the forest.
'Why does my brother spare these dogs?' cried the Blackfoot; 'we should have taken six scalps to-night, and my brother has but one.'
'We don't set much store by scalps, exceptin' our own, Warwolf,' replied the cowboy; 'and whites don't care about shootin' men without arms in their hands.'
It took all Dick Wharton's eloquence, however, and tried Warwolf's gratitude for his deliverance to the uttermost, before he could be persuaded not to pursue the five unhappy Crows that night. It was a clear waste of the good gifts of Providence, he thought, and, though Dick Wharton might be a good fellow and a mighty warrior for a whiteskin, he could not help feeling that he was something quite out of the common as a fool. He followed his old friend Wharton back to camp, however, and there dressed his wounds, and gave his deliverers some account of what had been happening lately in Bull Pine Park and its neighbourhood.
Needless to say that for a night or so, at any rate, the three boys and the old foreman, with Warwolf for an ally, had no fear of attack from the disarmed Crows. Still they kept a good look-out, from habit.