Runners were sent out, and during the evening representatives came in from the hunting parties allied to the Piegans. There were chiefs of the Small Robes, Blackfeet proper, Blackfeet Sioux, which linked the league with the Dacotahs and counterbalanced the Crows, in case Ahnemekee objected to the new and narrow arrangement, and some Rovers. These summed up as one hundred and fifty war men. The Yager counted them and recognised the elders among them with relief and gladness. He had resolved to crush out Kidd and his crew to the last man. He had contemplated the march of events with secret satisfaction, having prepared many of them; and the great progress made in a few days was enormously gratifying.
A little while before he and his nephew and Cherokee Bill stood against huge odds. Now they were commanding an army. If the reds were not perfect matches to the gold grabbers, they were quite so to the Manitobans, and the Scotch Canadians and Americans formed a reserve, or backbone, which ensured success.
Now the intruders were being enveloped in a net of which the meshes were self-plaiting themselves all around them. When the fowler pulled the string, the game would be inextricably caught.
At a final council held at night the concord was perfected. Saying nothing of hostilities against the border settlers, Montana miners, railroad surveyors, and pioneers north, the objective point of the allied reds, with Jim Ridge as mere counsellor and volunteer private, was to be Elk's Leap, where Captain Kidd, reinforced by the French Canadians, was tending to enter the Yellowstone Park.
Runners and riders went out to collect scouts and strayers. Messengers were selected to throw a sheaf of arrows, a knife, and a bag of powder and balls into the camp of Captain Kidd and that of the Red River Rovers if separate. The war pole, forty feet high, was set up at the Piegan camp, for the war dance to be performed round it. Jim Ridge did not join in the capering, but the Cherokee, curtly remarking that "it would do him good," stripped, and paraded, and leaped among the dancers. The cut of his hatchet on the pole was a tie with Red Knife's for height of the bound and cleanness of the chop. At the dawn, the deputies hurried to their camps to marshal their braves and conduct them to the rendezvous.
It is to be noted that the Red Indians spring sharply from their laziness of peacetimes into the strain of warfare. They become other men. Metamorphosed entirely, they endure with unflinching stoicism the greatest fatigue and longest privations. The very men who were ridiculous sloths and gluttons will never groan at having no sight of food for two, three, or even four days, or even at having no water.
Then they are granite and stop for nothing, and are not surprised at any disaster. Cold, heat, sun or rain, snow or hail, these are silently mocked at. Hence the secret foundation of their rapid movements, the fury of their attack, and their unconquerable energy in battle.
After the final talk, Ridge had a short conversation with Williams, immediately after which the latter left the camp. The white trapper had, we have remarked, kept himself out of the savage demonstration, sitting at a watch fire without even dozing off. A white man with an army of reds is like a chemist experimenting with an explosive of which all the qualities have yet to be tested. In some unexpected manner the whole may hoist the engineer himself.
About an hour after sunrise the Cherokee returned. He was accompanied by two white hunters. They were to be the guards of Doña Rosario, who, though she made a wry face about it, as if she personally wished to assist in the deliverance of Miss Maclan, consented reluctantly to being lodged in one of Jim Ridge's mountain refuges.
"Poor girl," murmured he, as she departed, "what a blessing that she has no idea that I am her kinsman, and that her father has perhaps lost his life in helping Bill to wrest her from that villain."