CHAPTER VI. LIGHTNING JO IN A SCRIMMAGE.
Yes; Lightning Jo found that the Comanches were coming, and at a rather rapid rate, too. There was no flinging himself over the side of his mustang and making him a shield against the blows of the red-skins, for the latter were on every side of him. The fact was they had recognized that peculiar yell of his, and hastily laid their plans to make him prisoner.
But Jo wasn’t made a prisoner yet, by a long shot, and finding that he was at a disadvantage on the back of his steed, he quietly slipped off; looping his rifle by a contrivance of his own to his side, he whipped out a couple of revolvers, one in either hand, and the fun began on the instant.
It wasn’t the way of Jo to await the opening of a game like this, but to open it himself, and the instant he could cock the handy little weapons, he began popping away right and left, the astounded Comanches going down like ten-pins before the savage “bull-dogs,” who had a way of biting every time they gave utterance to a bark. But there were but ten such “bites” available, and carefully as the scout husbanded his ammunition, the barrels were speedily emptied without any sensible diminution of his peril.
There was no one Comanche, nor no single half-dozen of them, that would have believed it possible to secure possession of Lightning Jo, and so they went into the scrimmage in such overwhelming numbers that escape upon his part looked impossible. By the time the barrels of his revolvers were emptied there were fully fifty Indians surrounding him. Nearly, if not quite all of them, were mounted, and they were not the men to show mercy to such a character as Lightning Jo, who had worked more mischief against the tribe than any dozen frontiersmen with whom they had exchanged shots.
Had this indomitable scout been alone upon the prairie his lighting would undoubtedly have been of the most terrific nature, and he would have died, like Colonel Crockett at the Alamo, with an “army of dead” about him; but with all of Jo’s wonderful prowess, he saw that the assistance of his friends was needed, and without any hesitation he gave utterance to his “call,” which reached the ears of his listening cavalrymen, who were equally prompt in responding to the cry.
But the time that must elapse between the call and the arrival of reinforcements, short as it was, was all sufficient for the Comanches to encompass the death of a dozen antagonists, unless they were checked by a most stubborn and skillful resistance.
And just that resistance and that fight now took place.