It is strange that such a dog should not have known the risk he ran in making such a taunt.
The Indian had scarcely fallen when several of his comrades started down the declivity to bring away his body. At the same moment, Egbert Rodman, who was in one of the wagons, sprung out, and was seen to run at full speed in the direction of the fallen man.
“Come back! come back! or you’re a dead man!” shouted Captain Shields, divining his purpose on the instant.
But the young man’s lips were set, and he was determined upon possessing that canteen, if it were within the range of human possibility. He saw a horde of Comanches swarming down the gulch on a full run, screeching like demons, and evidently certain of securing the daring Yengee, whose torturing thirst had stolen away his senses.
But Egbert was not to be deterred by any such appalling danger as this. Now that he had undertaken the desperate task, nothing but death should turn him aside!
In far less time than it requires to be narrated, he had sped over the intervening ground, and was at the prostrate figure. He was fleet of foot, and he ran as he never ran before, reaching it, however, only a few seconds in advance of the rescuing Comanches, one of whom actually fired and missed him, when scarcely a rod in advance.
One tremendous jerk of his arm, and Egbert threw the dead Indian off the canteen, and catching it up in his hand, he turned about and started at the same headlong speed for the encampment, clinging to the vessel as if it was his own life; but the Comanches were all about him, and it looked as if it was all up, when he whipped out his only weapon—his revolver, and blazed away right and left in their very faces. At the same instant the whites opened fire, and made such havoc, that in the confusion Egbert made a dash, and sped like a reindeer for the wagons, and leaped in behind them with the canteen and the water and himself intact.
Then a shout went up from within the little band, and making his way to the central wagon, Egbert first furnished the moaning children with several swallows of the delicious—(oh, how delicious!) fluid, no argument inducing Lizzie Manning to take a drop, until all her companions had first done so.
Then the brave fellow made his way from man to man, every one partaking of the soul-reviving cold water, whose delicious taste could not have been approached by the “nectar of the gods.”