This one seemed to be in distress, for he tossed about from time to time. Once as the light blazed a little he threw himself with face toward the fire, which lit up his features and showed him to be not an Indian, but a white man. He mumbled something, and a squaw who was watching the sick man closely stepped to his side and gave him a drink of water. Then he rose to a sitting posture and began to rub his leg.
“Too tight, heap hurt,” he half groaned.
“Better soon,” his dusky nurse said comfortingly, while she loosened the bandages to ease his sorely wounded foot, saying as she did so, “Lie down, heap sleep, soon well.”
The patient heeded only part of the advice; he threw himself back into his blanket muttering, “Ugh, heap hurt!” then grinding his teeth savagely, he added, half to himself, “I’ll fix the devils that put me in this fix.”
“Maybe so killum white man, huh?” grunted one of the bucks sitting near.
“Shoot ’em like dogs,” was the bitter reply.
“Injun heap mad at cow men,” came the suggestive rejoinder.
The sufferer, as will be easily guessed, was Bud Nixon. Luck had flung him among the Indians shortly after his precipitate departure from Morgan’s dance. A kind of stupid, stubborn pride had kept him from turning to any of the ranchers for help, though any one of them would have given cheerfully the assistance his distress called for. Rather than ask it, however, he wandered on aimlessly trying to show his grit, until, overcome by loss of blood, he swooned and fell from his horse.
How long he lay in this faint he did not know. Luckily for him, two Indian hunters, following the mountain trail he had taken, found him stretched out, pale and bleeding, while his trusty horse cropped at the grass a few rods away. These dusky good Samaritans soon revived the wounded man and took him back to camp, where they left him in charge of old Towano, their medicine man, whose power to heal the sick was held in superstitious awe by the tribe, though the modern physicians would no doubt scoff at such clumsy attempts at healing as he used.
It proved good fortune, however, for Bud that he was given help of any kind soon. His neglect of his wound had already brought on a fever, and blood poison was threatening. The medicine man did his best with incantations to drive the disease away. It is doubtful, however, that his rattling, juggling tricks helped much. The faithful nursing of the white patient’s foot by Towano’s old squaw was no doubt the help that put him, after a few days, on the way to recovery. But these were bitter days for Bud at best. To suffer such indignity at the hands of his friends, to be shot and kicked out into the night, and finally to be forced to lie like a beggar among Redskins, taking their nauseating doses, their coarse food, the dirt and discomfort of their wickiups, in storm and shine,—all this rankled in his soul as he lay convalescing, and filled his heart with hate and a stubborn resolve to get revenge.