"Then look to your guns, whet your knives, and all be ready to march."
In half an hour the start was made, the men being allowed to finish their pipes as they proceeded in single file. Down sloping ground, Ridge led them into a valley, where an unseen river gurgled like a pond of sunfish. A beaver dam had intercepted this flow, but the beaver meadow was one sheet of perfectly unruffled ice, under which the running water could be seen by the bubbles at the airholes. Like so many schoolboys, the men, with a start down the bank, shot themselves across this expanse to the wood of tender trees among the stumps cut by the industrious natural engineer. Here Cherokee Bill took the head of the Indian file. For twenty minutes the string of men advanced in absolute quiet, forbearing to snap a dry twig, dislodge a stone, or crush the ice crust. Bill guided them so skilfully that they were always well sheltered, till finally they came out into a hodgepodge of boulders in a sand black and fine as gunpowder, resembling the remains of bones and vegetables in a giant's stew kettle out of which he had drained the broth. It occupied the centre of the end of the beaver meadow, and protected the rivulet channel.
It was the halting post, and a more unscalable and defensible position it were difficult to select. Under them in front the level ground extended where the Bois Brulés' caravan had been drawn through, hindrances which any but western wagoners would deem insurmountable. The hunters were shielded on all sides, and invisible. On the white patches of snow they descried the unsuspecting red men leisurely nearing the palisades of the Canadians to take up position for the storming. The stockade showed that the Half-breeds intended no move, and as Indians almost never attack in darkness, the little force on observation placidly lay down to await their cue to intervene.
Streaks of fog and a dull greyish yellow cloudbank closed in the setting sun. In the night the wolves called to one another, and seemed, in their language, to exchange information on the movements of so many men in the solitude, and laughed at the prospect of carnage on the morrow.
When the moon shone wan and cold, it not only was adorned with a livid snow ring, but was accompanied by four "dogs," or weird images of its pale self, which made the superstitious red men shudder. As for the whites, hardy as the Scotch-American becomes, they luxuriated under the blankets and furs which Jim Ridge had generously offered, and mocked at the glacial chill of the morning frost. A few showers of fine ice, rather than snow, fell on the lookouts of the mountain men's "fort," of the Crows and of the Canadians, suffering with the feverish wakeful sleepiness to which soldiers, seamen, and hunters are subjected at the worst stage in the darkest and coldest hours of dawn.
At length stripes of pallid gold and blue announced a sunless day. None but a snow owl saluted it, and that was a sneering, melancholy hoot borne on the gusty breeze, laden with sleet, ice, and sand.
The twilight was of a milky opal hue, which concentrated in a midair layer, while the ground air cleared up and allowed a tolerably extended view. It seemed an ominous pall over the threatened camps.
Suddenly a vivid glare reddened the plain. A war drum thundered, and the Crow war whoop furiously resounded.
Ahnemekee's war whistle piped his band on with piercing notes.