“Who shot?” cried Pedro. “Senor, I say, who shot?”
“It came from inside the hill, I’ll take my oath to it!” declared Robidoux.
“I know it did, senor—I know it did;” and Pedro’s voice showed he was excited. “No one shot here, and some one shot from inside the hill and killed a savage. Who shot?”
They could not tell.
CHAPTER XIII.
A MIRACULOUS ESCAPE.
On the “reach” above the fissure in which Cimarron Jack’s band was concealed, danced and whooped the entire band of Apaches, eager for white blood, and, as prospects appeared, in good chances of getting it. Conspicuous among the painted pack stalked Red-Knife, the renegade, to and fro, cogitating and framing a feasible plan for extermination.
It needed not a very subtle brain or a very bold man to ferret out the whites from their present position, and well he knew it. While many plans, ideas and means gratuitously presented themselves to his scheming head, but one was accepted—at once the most feasible, the easiest executed, and the one attended with the least danger—a surround.
Conjectured, planned, advocated—done; so he thought, in his inordinate self-esteem. He did not for a moment consider that the noted “squaw from the bitter river” was thoroughly versed in savage warfare—that he had a vast store of experience to draw from—that he was crafty and brave as a lion. In his vast conceit, he entirely ignored the fact, and went directly on with putting his plan into execution.
The whites were in an isolated fissure about fifteen feet in depth by twenty wide and one hundred long, in the shape of a horse-shoe, the party being ensconced under the bank at the “caulk” in the concavity. Here they were safe for the present, but a small ravine opening from the fissure, rendered their situation precarious. This ravine played an important part in the tragedy, for whose acts the actors were now preparing earnestly.