Instead of drawing his knife, Teddy placed himself in position, as though he were some pugilistic champion, with his fists as his bulwarks.
“Be jabers! if I only had some place to back up ag’inst,” he muttered, as he glanced over his shoulder. “I have the other side of this blamed old kinyon, but, as the same is twinty feet away, I can’t lean against it very well, and at the same time, there’s little danger of the spalpeens attacking me in the raar.”
There was that consolation, truly, but Teddy stood in a very ticklish position, where a slight blow was likely to send him over the rock into the water below.
The Indians evidently looked upon themselves as masters of the situation; but, at the same time, they were very wary about attacking a man to whom such a bellicose attitude seemed to come very natural.
They made no outcry, but grasping their knives, and fixing their dark eyes upon the white man, like cats about to pounce upon their prey, they separated from each other, and cautiously advanced to the assault.
Teddy was no unskilful pugilist, and he saw that, barring any accident, he had the advantage of these dusky assassins, despite the knives in their hands; for they knew nothing at all of the art of self-defense.
Several feet separated the hostile parties, when the Irishman made a lightning-like leap, sending out a terrific left-hander at the same time, “straight from the shoulder,” that, striking the nose of the astonished red-skin, sent him turning several back-somersaults.
Wheeling with the same extraordinary celerity, he bestowed a similar compliment upon the other red-skin, and vigorously following it up, forced him over the edge of the rock into the cañon below.
Old Stebbins had not been long in detecting that something was wrong with his friend. He understood what his defiant whoop meant, and knew that he had dropped into a nest of Indians.
But how to help him!