CHAPTER XIV. THE LAST DAY IN DEAD MAN’S GULCH.
Only a few seconds and Egbert Rodman was in the middle of the encampment, breathless and wild.
“The whole horde of Indians are coming back!” he called out, as soon as he could frame the words. “They are but a short distance away and will be here in the next minute!”
The words had scarcely been uttered when the borders of the gulch were swarming with yelling Comanches. The women had barely time to scramble under shelter, when the red-skins were upon them.
“Fire, as you can load and aim!” called out Captain Shields, while yet his men were leaping to their places. “Don’t wait, but let them have it! We may as well die fighting like men!”
Crack! crack! barked the rifles of the scouts, in a regular fusillade among the horsemen, the fatal results being instantly seen, in the Comanches here and there dropping from the backs of their mustangs.
This destructive fire accomplished the best thing possible, in that it prevented the wholesale charge that was so much to be dreaded; as it could not fail to be deadly fatal almost on the instant.
The incessant sleet of bullets sent into the ranks of the red-skins created an unexpected confusion, and just as our friends had reached the last round of their ammunition, they fell back out of range, and dismounting, crept to the edge of the gulch and began firing down upon the encampment, just as the scouts themselves would have done had the position been reversed.
Despite the exaggerated assertion of the startled Egbert, as he dashed into the camp, Captain Shields became well satisfied from the glimpse he had gained, that the Comanche force was divided, and he was now fighting against only a portion of those against whom he had been pitted before, the others, as he rightly suspected, having followed on in the pursuit of the flying messenger, and with the purpose of entrapping and ambuscading the cavalry that would be sent, in all probability, to the rescue of the little band of whites.
But there was little consolation to be derived from this discovery, as there were certainly over a hundred Comanches at hand, and they unquestionably had the power, when they should choose to put it forth, to crush out of existence himself and every one of his brave men. One single determined charge, a few minutes’ appalling conflict around the wagons, and then not a man need be left to tell the awful tale of the last appalling massacre of Dead Man’s Gulch.