Cautiously producing my field glasses I examined the collar and discovered it to be made of stained porcupine quills cleverly worked on a buckskin band. The field glasses also told me that the boy’s shirt was trimmed with the same material, while a duplicate of the sheep’s collar formed a band which encircled his head, confining the long black hair and preventing it from falling over his face, but leaving it free to hang down his back to a point below the waist line.
So absorbed was I in this unique spectacle that I carelessly allowed my elbow to dislodge a loose fragment of stone which went clattering down the face of the precipice. This proved to be almost fatal carelessness, for, with a movement as quick as the stroke of a rattlesnake, the lad placed an arrow to the string of a bow and sent the barbed shaft with such force, promptitude and precision that it went through my fur cap, the arrow entangling a bunch of my hair, taking it along with it.
“Squat lower, Le-loo; arrows has been the death of many a man afore you,” whispered Big Pete in my ear, but even as he spoke another arrow sang over our crouching bodies, shaving the protecting rock so closely that their plumed tips brushed the dust on our backs.
“Waugh! Good shootin’, by gum! I never seed it beat; if he onct sots them black eyes on our hulking carcasses he’ll get us yit,” muttered my guide, enthusiastically. “He’s mighty slender, quick and purty—but so also be a rattlesnake!” he exclaimed, as another arrow slit the sleeve of his wamus as cleanly as if it were cut with a knife.
“For God’s sake, stop!” I shouted, in real alarm. The boy paused, but with an arrow still drawn to its head. His eyes flashing, head erect, one moccasined foot on the ram’s body, the other braced against the cliff; his short fawn-colored skin shirt clung to his lithe body, and the fringed edges hung over the dreadful black chasm in front of him. It was a picture to take away one’s breath. “Put down your weapon, and we will stand with our hands up,” I cried. Slowly the bow was lowered and as slowly Big Pete and I arose, holding our empty hands aloft. “Now, young fellow, tell us your pleasure.”
There are a few gray hairs showing at my temples which first made their appearance while I was crouching behind that stone on the edge of the chasm.
To my polite inquiry asking his pleasure, the wild boy made no reply but glanced at us with the utmost contempt when Big Pete went through some gestures in Indian sign language. The lad mutely pointed to the dead sheep, the sight of which seemed to enrage him again, for insensibly his fingers tightened on the bow and the wood began to curve after a manner which sent me ducking behind the sheltering stone again; but Big Pete only folded his arms across his broad chest and looked the boy straight in the eyes.
Never will I forget that picture, the cold, bleak, snow-covered mountains towering above them, the black abyss of Sheol between them; neither would hesitate to take life, neither possessed a fear of death; but with every muscle alert and every nerve alive these two wild things stood facing each other, mutually observing a truce because of—what? Because, in spite of the fighting instinct or, maybe, because of it they both secretly admired each other.
CHAPTER XII
The black chasm which separated us from the trail of the wild hunter was not as formidable a barrier as the unfathomable abyss which separates the reader from what he thinks he would have done had he been in my place, and what really would have been his plan of action.