“Right you are, Henry,” said another of the party. “Sam deserves a good deal of credit for saving us.”
To give the others of the expedition time to get as far as possible from the scene of action, it was decided to wait awhile before beginning an attack on the Indians. The latter waited patiently for over an hour, when they began to show some uneasiness, thinking their plot had miscarried.
“Now we’ll show ’em a trick or two,” said Sam Barringford, and gave the order to advance.
The Indians were taken completely by surprise, and at the first fire of the English three fell, one dead and the others mortally wounded. One other was struck in the thigh and rolled down the hill on to the trail below.
“Give it to ’em again!” roared Sam Barringford. “Give it to ’em, the sons o’ Satan!” And he fired a second time, while some of the others did the same. Another Indian went down, and then the rest fled, in several directions. The whites went after them, and in the end fully half of the band under Eagle Nose were exterminated. Eagle Nose himself was struck in the left forearm, and withdrew with the rest of his warriors, vowing bitter vengeance.
Of the whites, strange to state, not one was injured, although the red men fired arrows and shots at them many times. One arrow went through the hunting shirt of one of the frontiersmen, and a bullet clipped the cap of another, and that was all. The Indians fled to the northward, and that was the last seen of them for a long while to come. Some were very bitter against Eagle Nose for leading them into a trap, as they expressed it, and there was some talk of deposing the chief, but nothing came of this.
“Sam, you saved us from utter annihilation,” said Joseph Morris, when the two parts of the expedition had been once more united. “I thank you from the bottom of my heart,” and he gave the old frontiersman’s hand a tight squeeze.
“I wish I had been in that fight,” said Dave to Henry. “It must have been exciting.”
“It was, but not as much so as some of the fights we had during the war,” answered his cousin. “We had the Indians on the run from the very start.”
No time was now lost in moving forward, it being Joseph Morris’s wish to leave the Indians as far behind as possible. They traveled until late at night, when they reached a safe shelter among the rocks and trees. It was now cloudy once more, and soon after they went into camp it began to snow.