Startled and confused by the sudden volley which was delivered with slaughterously fatal precision, the scarcely awakened red-skins leapt to their feet. Then came a volley from the party of Rangers with Harry Arnold. It was followed by another from mine. I had taken the precaution of ordering every other man to fire with each discharge, so as to give the preceding marksmen time to reload. Like clock-work rang out our deadly rifles, each shot dropping a man.
Fright had almost maddened the Indians, from the first intimation we had given them of our presence. Some ran from side to side of the plateau, looking vainly for a chance to escape. Others attempted to scale the declivity on which my portion of the boys were posted, and the rocks above which Harry held his position, in the very face of our fire. A few stood and endeavored to return us what we were giving them. However, they were considerably below either party; consequently, their shots rattled on the rocky sides of either slope short of us.
Again and again our untiring volleys rang out on the no longer quiet dawn.
Then, actually frantic with terror, many of the doomed savages leapt from the brink of the precipice. Others contrived to scramble over the broken edge of it, on the precarious and jutting portions of which they would scarcely, even in mid-day, under other circumstances, have trodden. In less than probably ten minutes from our first fire, not a living Indian remained in the camp where they had lately been sleeping. On examining this—for it would have been useless and, perhaps, dangerous for us to follow the runaways—we found enough to convince us that the white men had lately been severely punished. Scalps, shot-pouches, and carbines, with other tokens, were hurriedly left behind in their flight, to testify to this.
"We were not quick enough after the red devils, Mose!"
Arnold said this, as, with a positively qualmish sensation in my throat, I was standing upon that stony stretch of level ground which was now reekingly slippery with blood.
"We had better leave at once for the place where our horses are."
"I'd like to know who the whites were the darned scoundrels have trimmed so neatly?"
While saying this, he was meditatively turning over two scalps which lay on the gore-stained rock, beside a motionless red-skin, now as scalpless as the bodies from which he had taken them.
"P'raps," ejaculated Brighton Bill, whose feelings had in the last few years marvellously changed in regard to the legitimate manner of fighting the red-skins, "they be some o' Hormsby's chaps."