This was a long, low line of green, indicating a ditch, or slough, edged with saw-palmettoes and bay bushes, that began at some indefinite northwestward point and diagonally crossed the prairie until it passed around our Oasis scarcely more than a hundred feet away. Heretofore, completely hidden by the tall grass, I had had no idea of its existence, and neither had the men, until Doloria's torch changed the prairie to a charred waste. In reality it was the outlet from our spring, and I knew that it must be fairly wide because the fire had not jumped it.
To Efaw Kotee's band it offered both an immediate cover and a place from which to carry on the fight; moreover, by following it toward us, they could reach the Oasis and eventually creep up behind so near that a well-directed shot in my head would be only a question of persistence and time.
Doloria must have understood this, and for the first time she began to fire, yet at nearly a thousand yards, when one's target not only moves but looks small and black upon a blackened background, and is made further elusive by a haze of smoke, only luck can hit it. Still we played that luck to the last card, until one by one the men made safe and disappeared. Then she laid her rifle on the parapet, and I think took a long breath. For a moment neither of us spoke, each being afraid of saying too much, perhaps.
Beginning to fill the magazine, she finally announced:
"They're seven, Jack. You hit that first one, a while ago."
"No," I replied, "or we'd see him on the ground now. He merely ducked, like the others."
"But there were eight the night I escaped!"
"Then Smilax got one during the chase—which shows that he and Echochee haven't been killed." But during this our eyes never left the ditch and our rifles were ready to blaze away at the first sign of movement.
"Why?" she asked.
"Because if he had to make a last stand there wouldn't be as many as seven men here now." And I firmly believed it, knowing how savagely our two servants would account for themselves. I think she agreed with me.