[HAD THE FIRST VOLLEY KILLED ANYBODY? DIDN’T LOOK SO]
That had been quick and smart work. Lieutenant Bourke and Lieutenant Ross and Tom Moore were no fools; and that sinewy man in the canvas suit was no fool, either.
“Inju! Bueno! (Good! Good!)” chattered Micky, in Apache and Spanish both. “Huh! Tonto run already! Cowards!”
“Hurrah! There come the other soldiers!” babbled Jimmie.
The carbines were banging, as the first troop began to fight—officers shouted, the man in the canvas suit jumped out, yelled orders and pointed, and leveled his shot-gun—“Bang!” The first troop, dismounted to the notes of a bugle, deployed on, firing, another troop was spurring in at a gallop—and the Tontos were scampering off through the timber.
Jimmie was just about to spring upright, glad, when Micky nudged him hard, in warning. Not all the Tontos had gone. The two who had dropped into ambush among the rocks at the timber edge had been cut off by the cavalry, and were now running back, and dancing and dodging, their heads turned.
“Don’t shoot them!” shouted the canvas suit man, in a loud voice. “We have them!”
He was running, too—and his officers—and the foremost of the men—from tree to tree, after them, to surround them at the edge of the basin. The two Tontos had crouched, again, behind a large boulder. Jimmie might have tossed a stone and struck them; they were close in front of him and Micky, and fully exposed, against the boulder. But the soldiers had formed a half circle, hemming them in against the basin’s edge. Up straightened the two Tontos, behind their rock, drew their bows to the arrows’ heads, and stood, at bay, aiming now here, now there, threatening their enemies.
“Don’t shoot them!” the canvas suit man kept shouting. “Take them alive.” And he called to the Tontos: “Friends! Friends!”