He, however, thought fit to try another cañon to the left.
For the first time since I had been an inhabitant of the Plains, I neglected to arm myself, as I had constantly been accustomed to, when scouting. The good servants of Uncle Sam, whom we had met earlier in the day, had travelled up the road. Of course they had sharp eyes. Besides, if the red-skins had seen them, they would certainly have got out of their way as quickly as possible. How should they know our Uncle wanted to be theirs, too? Peace would be the very last thing they thought of, when they set eyes upon his uniform. So, thinking there could be no danger, I placed my sheath-knife in my belt, and taking my Kentucky rifle with me, started.
Walking carelessly up the cañon, now examining the trees for game, then scaling the declivity to the right, or pushing through the chapparal and the heavy timber, I had wandered on, for more than an hour.
Suddenly, in one of the thick and tangled clumps of chapparal, I fancied I heard the familiar note of one of the birds I was in search of. At once, I stopped to listen.
While standing there silent and motionless, it could scarcely have been more than fifty seconds, I heard a noise almost immediately behind. Instinct or experience, one or both, told me what that sound was. The red-skins had not been so scared by the advance of Uncle Sam's servants, as necessarily to refrain from a dash for one of his children, if the chance was given them. I felt the chance was now.
Turning immediately, I had barely time to see two Indians.
In another instant, before I could lift my gun to my shoulder, one of them had bounded towards me and wrenched it from my grasp, while the other sprung at me with the evident intention of clinching me. If I had then the time to think, I fear, loyal American as I might be, my thoughts might have corroborated Brighton Bill's opinions touching the sanity of Uncle Sam. Fortunately, I had no time to become critically disloyal. My hunting-knife had been drawn, and at the very moment when his hot and vindictively fierce breath came searingly to my face, was buried to the very hilt in his heart.
As he fell, the other of my assailants, with my own rifle clubbed, struck me a heavy blow upon the shoulder. It nearly felled me to the earth.
Then, dropping the weapon, he sprang upon me, making a desperate clutch for the hand in which my knife was grasped. As he seized my wrist, I threw the knife from me as far as I could, and grappled with him. He attempted to draw his own. I, however, had grasped him by a peculiarly tender portion of his person, which modesty prevents me from naming. The pain of this prevented his using his knife, and in the contest we both fell on the sloping side of the cañon, clinched together firmly.