He meditated long before he reached down and gathered up his offspring. Carefully wrapping up the wailing infant, he handed it to a squaw who stood near shivering and moaning wildly. “Stay here and hold my boy. I am going back.”
Shoving cartridges into his magazine, he made his way down, the light snow flying before him. Rounding the rocks he could see down into the main canon; see the pony-soldiers and their Indian allies tearing down and burning the lodges. The yellow glare of many fires burned brightly in contrast with the cold blue of the snow. He scanned narrowly the place where his own lodge had been and saw it fall before many hands to be taken to their fires. With raised shoulders and staring eyes he stood aghast. He drunk in the desecration in all its awful significance. The bat’s skin—the hand of the Good Gods—was removed from him; his shadow was as naked as his back.
In the snow a hundred yards below him lay his young squaw, the mother of his boy, and she had not moved since she lay down.
As the pony-soldiers finally saw the stark figure of the Indian among the rocks they sent a shower of bullets around him. He had no medicine; the Bad Gods would direct the bullets to his breast. He turned and ran frantically away.
The last green-grass had seen the beplumed chief with reddened battle-ax leading a hundred swift warriors over the dying pony-soldiers, but now the cold, blue snow looked on a naked man running before bullets, with his medicine somewhere in the black smoke which began to hang like a pall over the happy winter camp of the bravest Indians. The ebb and flow of time had fattened and thinned the circumstances of the Fire Eater’s life many times, but it had never taken his all before. It had left him nothing but his boy and a nearly empty gun. It had placed him between the fire of the soldiers’ rifles and the cruel mountain winds which would pinch his heart out.
With his boy at his breast he flew along the rim-rock like a crow, hunting for shelter from bullets and wind. He longed to expend his remaining cartridges where each would put out a white man’s fire. Meanwhile, recovering from their surprise, the Indians had gathered thickly on the heights and fought stiffly back. Being unable to follow them, the pony-soldiers drew back, but as they retreated they left the village blazing, which the Chis-chis-chash could not prevent. Their rifles had only handed them over to the hungry winter.
The Fire Eater sat muffled on a ledge, firing from time to time, and anxiously scanning his shots. The cold made him shake and he could not hold his rifle true. His old, thin blood crept slowly through his veins, and the child cried piteously. His fires were burning low; even the stimulus of hate no longer stirred him as he looked down on the white men who had burned his all and shot his wife and were even then spattering his den in the rocks with lead. He gave up, overpowered by the situation. With infinite difficulty he gathered himself erect on his stiffened joints and took again his burden in his trembling arms. Standing thus on the wind-swept height, with the bullets spotting the rocks around him, he extended his right hand and besought the black, eddying smoke to give him back his bat-skin; he begged the spirits of the air to bring it to him. He shouted his harsh pathos at a wild and lonely wind, but there was no response.
Then off through the withering cold and powdery snow moved the black figure of despair tottering slowly away from the sound of rifles which grew fainter at each step. He chattered and mumbled, half to himself, half to the unseen influences of nature, while the child moaned weakly under his clutched robe. When he could but barely hear the noises of the fight, he made his way down into the canon where he shortly came upon a group of his tribesmen who had killed a pony and were roasting pieces over a log fire. They were mostly women and children, or old, old men like himself. More to note than their drawn and leathery faces was the speechless terror brooding over all. Their minds had not digested their sudden fate. If the young warriors broke before the guns of the pony-soldiers, worse yet might overtake them, though the windswept table lands dismayed them equally with the bullets. Munching their horse-meat, clutching their meager garments, they elbowed about the fires saying little. In their homeless helplessness their souls deadened. They could not divine the immediate future. Unlike the young warriors whose fires flashed brighter as the talons of Death reached most fiercely for them, they shuddered and crouched.
