The first night passed with little disturbance, as we have already shown, and the second day the battle was renewed and kept up with scarcely an intermission until nightfall.
This day, especially the latter portion, was very warm, and the suffering of the little band was terrible—so much so that many of the living envied the dead, who had been so speedily released from their distress. The thirst felt by all was a perpetual torment, from which there was scarcely the slightest relief. Many of the men, despite the great danger, dug into the ground, until the damp soil was reached, which they scooped up and placed in their mouths as a slight assuagement of their anguish.
The females stood the trial like martyrs, for their own greatest suffering was that of seeing the half-dozen moaning children piteously begging for water, when there was none to give them.
The history of the world has proven that men will run any risk, no matter what, for the sake of satisfying the maddening thirst, that threatens to drive them raving wild; and, it was this that was the cause of one of the most daring deeds ever recorded, upon the part of young Egbert Rodman.
The Comanches could not but be aware of this fearful distress of the whites, and with a fiendish malignity, characteristic of the Indian race, just at nightfall, when the Dead Man’s Gulch was bathed in mellow twilight, one of the red-skins was seen to leap off his mustang and walk toward the encampment, with a large tin canteen in his hand—a relic undoubtedly of some massacre of United States soldiers.
There was a lull in the firing at this moment, and the whites, at a loss to understand the meaning of the proceeding, stealthily peered out from their coverts in the wagons, to learn what new trick was on the tapis.
It looked as if he were going to summon them to surrender, or call for a parley, as he walked straight forward until he was within a hundred feet of the nearest wagon, when he paused and held up the canteen before him, contorting his face into the most grotesque grimaces, and shaking the vessel in front and over his head.
The stillness at this moment was so profound, that more than one distinctly heard the gurgle of water in the vessel, and, if any doubt remained of the red-skin’s purpose, it was dissipated by his calling out, in broken English:
“Yengese—come—muchee drink—hab muchee drink—”
These words were scarcely uttered, when crack, crack went two rifles almost simultaneously, and the foolhardy wretch made a scrambling leap, and his taunting words ended in a wild howl, as he fell prostrate across the can, that he had brandished so tormentingly in the faces of the sufferers.