“You are no Pawnee. They would scalp you, too. Were you afraid?”
“No. No one is afraid, with Chief Pike.”
Baroney laughed. He was a small, dark, black-bearded man who spoke about as much Pawnee as Scar Head spoke French, but was good at the sign language; so by using all three means, with now and then a word of Spanish, he got along.
They had ridden about a mile, and were slowly overtaking the American column, when another band of figures came charging. The medicine-man sighted them, the first, for he pointed—and they indeed looked, at a distance, to be more Indians, issuing from ambush in a river bottom on the left and launching themselves to cut off the Chief Pike squad.
Scar Head himself read them with one keen stare.
“Elk,” he grunted, in Pawnee, and stiffened with the hunt feeling.
Baroney called, excitedly; but Chief Pike had read, too. He shouted, turned his horse and shook his reins and flourished his gun, and away he dashed, to meet the elk. In a flash Scar Head clapped his heels against his pony’s ribs, and tore after. The medicine-man and Baroney tore, too, on a course of their own.
The yellow pony was a fast pony, well trained. He had been stolen from the Comanches, whose horses were the best. Scar Head rode light—a boy in only a buffalo robe. The American horses all were poor horses, even those traded for with the Pawnees, and Chief Pike, in his clothes, weighed twice as much, on the saddle, as Scar Head.
The yellow pony over-hauled the Chief Pike horse—crept up, from tail to stirrup, from stirrup to neck, from neck to nose. Scar Head, his moccasined feet thrust into thong loops, clung close. Chief Pike glanced aside at him, with blue eyes glowing, and smiled.
“Good meat,” he said, in French. “We two hunt.”