The Absaroke were the friends of the Yellow-Eyes who had a little fort at the mouth of the Muscleshell, where they gave their guns and gauds in great quantities. The Chis-chis-chash despised the men who wore hats. They barely tolerated and half protected their own traders. Nothing seemed so desirable as to despoil the Absaroke traders. They had often spied on the fort but always found the protecting Absaroke too numerous. The scouts of the Fire Eater, however, found immense trace of their enemy’s main camp as it moved up the valley of the Yellow-stone. They knew that the Absaroke had finished their yellow-grass trading and had gone to hunt the buffalo. They hoped to find the little fort unprotected. Accordingly they sped on toward that point, which upon arrival they found sitting innocently alone in the grand landscape. Not a tepee was to be seen.
Having carefully reconnoitered and considered the place, they left their horses in a dry washout and crawled toward it through the sage brush. As the sky grew pale toward the early sun there was no sign of discovery from its silent pickets. When within a hundred yards, in response to the commanding war-cry of the Fire Eater, they rose like ghosts from the sage and charged fast on the stockade. The gray logs stood stiffly unresponsive and gave no answering shots or yells as the Indians swept upon them. The gate was high, but the attacking force crept up on each other’s bent backs as they strove for the interior. A tremendous commotion arose; rifles blazed inside and out. Two or three Indians sprang over but were shot down. Hatchets hacked at the timbers; gun-muzzles and drawn arrows sought the crevices in the logs; piercing yells rose above the hoarse shouts of the besieged for the stockade was full of white men.
The savages had not noticed a great number of Mackinaw boats drawn up on the river bank and concealed by low bushes. These belonged to a brigade of freighters who were temporarily housed in the post. As the surprised whites and creoles swarmed to the defense the Indians found themselves outnumbered three to one. The Fire Eater, seeing several braves fall before the ever-increasing fire from the palisades and knowing he could not scale the barrier, ordered a withdrawal. The beaten band drew slowly away carrying the stricken brothers.
The medicine was bad—the war-prophet had not had free communication with the mystery of the Good Gods. Some one had allowed himself to walk in a beaten path or had violated the sacred rights of the warpath, and the spirit of secrecy had left their moccasins. The skin of the little brown bat did not comfort the Fire Eater in his fallen state. He cast many burning glances back at the logs, now becoming mellowed by the morning light. The sun had apparently thrown his protection over them and the omen struck home to the wondering, savage mind. He remembered that the old men had always said that the medicine of the Yellow-Eyes was very strong and that they always fought insensibly like the gray bears. The flashing rifles which had blown their bodies back from the fort had astonished these Indians less by their execution than by the indication they gave that the powers of darkness were not with them. They looked askance at the Fire Eater for their ill-success. He was enraged—a sudden madness had overpowered and destroyed his sense of the situation. One of those moods had come upon the savage child-mind when the surging blood made his eyes gleam vacantly like the great cats.
Slowly the dismayed band withdrew to the washout—casting backward glances at the walls which had beaten down their ambitions and would paint the tribes with ashes and blood-sacrifices for the lost. When there, they sat about dejectedly, finding no impulse to do more.
From out of the west, in response to their blue despondency, the clouds blew over the plains—the thunder rumbled—the rain came splashing and beating and then fell in blinding sheets. The Fire Eater arose and standing on the edge of the bank raised his arms in thanks to the Thunder Bird for his interposition in their behalf, saying: “Brothers, the Thunder Bird has come to his poor warriors to drive our enemies back as was promised to the prophet. He will put out the fires of the Yellow-Eyes, behind their medicine-logs. We are not afraid—our medicine is strong.”
The rain poured for a time but abated gradually as the crashing Thunder Bird hurried away to the rising sun, and with a final dash it separated into drops, letting the sunlight through the departing drizzle. The warriors began drying their robes and their weapons—preoccupied with the worries so much dampness had wrought for their powder and bow strings. Suddenly one of them raised his head, deerlike, to listen. As wild things they all responded, and the group of men was statuesque as it listened to the beat of horses’ hoofs. As a flock of blackbirds leaves a bush—with one motion—the statuary dissolved into a kaleidoscopic twinkle of movement as the warriors grabbed and ran and gathered. They sought their ponies’ lariats, but before they could mount a hundred mounted Yellow-Eyes swept down upon them, circling away as the Indians sowed their shots among them. But they were surrounded. The Thunder Bird had lied to the Chis-chis-chash—he had chosen to sacrifice the Fire Eater and the twenty Red-Lodge braves. There was now no thought of arresting the blow—there was but to die as their people always did in war. The keepers of the Red Lodge counting robes might cross the red pipes out with black, but they should not wash them out entirely.
The beaver-men—the traders—the creoles and the half-breeds slid from their horses and showered their bullets over the washout, throwing clouds of wet dirt over the braves crowding under its banks. The frightened Indian ponies swarmed out of one end of the cut, but were soon brought back and herded together in the sagebrush by the moccasin boys of the Yellow-Eyes.