Two young men were sent out as scouts, but they had hardly left before a whole string of persons and animals emerged from the forest with giddy rapidity. In the van was a mounted man, on a mare, who did not in the least slacken his furious pace, though turning every little while to fire his breech-loading rifle. He wore an Indian dress, and it was reasonably surmised that he was a chief, but the distance and the dust that sprang up from the alkali stretches among the scrub outside the forest prevented particulars being defined of his tribe, or even his nation.
He was followed by a girl in a sort of pannier seat on a large fleet mule. A mantle enveloped her, but the wind flapped it back, so that her sex was discernible as far as her attire and her mode of riding revealed. Behind her, separated by such varied spaces as the differences in their speed under burdens apportioned, six or eight beasts of burden rushed. As in their mad course through the woods their packs had been knocked about, pulled partly off, slewed to one side or under the bellies, or even trailing after by the lashings, every now and then one would be brought to a sudden stop, or hurled into a natural pithole half full of decayed leaves and melting snow. The squallings would redouble at these disasters.
After these fugitives upwards of a dozen horsemen came racing. Some waved lariats, or snapped whips, to cow the runaways into a pause, or to swerve from blindly following the leaders; some were using their guns at the foremost of this queer procession. But, though they stopped to take aim, they were not so expert or fortunate as he. The pursuers were Red River Half-breeds.
The pack animals did not clear the wood; the scrub was more entangling than the large growth, and they, at all events, were captured as they struggled after their harness was caught.
The two fugitives, on debouching upon the open ground, were in extreme peril. They had the river to cross under fire. Nevertheless, they did not seem discouraged. At least, the dark-complexioned man drove the lady's mule into the water, and halting himself on the bank crest, fired five shots almost as quickly as one into the line of pursuers, of which each emptied a saddle. The remainder howled with rage, and, forced to stop among the riderless and plunging steeds, discharged all their guns at the daring coverer of the girl's crossing.
The latter brandished his repeating rifle around his head, as if his warriorlike exultation was uncontrollable; an act alone denouncing him as no pure white. He then jabbed his heels into the flanks of the mare, which leaped in a beautiful curve into the river. In the leap he uttered a war cry new to that region:
"Wo!-O-whoo-whoo!" and it still resounded when he reappeared above the surface after the plunge.
The mule was floundering, the girl clinging to it with nail and tooth, so to say. But the mare, being directed to a shelving part of the other bank, the mule whinnied, and hurried to climb out also.
The two galloped on towards the Piegan encampment at full speed, letting the muddy water drip off them as it pleased. On seeing the Indians watching them, the horseman, whose buffalo robe had been washed away in the stream, shouted in a high, clear voice in Algonquin, the most generally understood language among the pure Indians north:
"A brother!"