When he got out into the open, he saw a dozen horsemen just coming into view over a rising ground between him and the sinking sun. He thought at first that his father was bringing company home to dinner, and he waited and watched. But he soon saw by the feathered and blanketed make-up and demeanor of the horsemen that they were savages on the warpath.
Dave was not long getting himself and his dog out of sight in a badger-hole which he had, during many days of hard labor, enlarged for a playhouse.
The Indians were a party of Cheyennes who had been forcibly located in the Indian Territory by the Government. On this occasion, half a thousand of those fierce warriors decided to go on the warpath and return to their former hunting grounds in Wyoming. On their way they burned houses and slew and scalped everybody that fell in their path. Among many other outrages they, for a little diversion, killed and scalped a young woman school-teacher and forty pupils. United States troops then rounded them up and corralled them in Fort Robinson, Nebraska. One night they made a break to escape and the soldiers, now out of patience, killed the whole bunch.
But to return to Dave: When the Indians saw the smoke coming out of the top of the ground, their curiosity was excited, and discovering that it was a dwelling they rode round it, red-man fashion, in a constantly narrowing circle, firing guns and war-whooping.
The dog began to bark and struggle to free himself to get after those Indians, but Dave thrust his hand into the animal’s mouth, and grasping his lower jaw managed to keep him from barking. It took all of Dave’s strength to hold that dog, but he knew that it meant life or death, for if the dog should escape he would betray their hiding-place.
The Indians, finding no sign of life in the dugout except the barking dogs that Dave had shut in, came closer and closer. Half a dozen of them got up on the top of the dugout, and the others bunched themselves in close to the entrance, preparatory to rushing the place.
But Dave had not succeeded in extinguishing the last spark of the fire that he had started under the bunks, so, coincidentally with the Indians arranging themselves about the cavern, the twelve kegs of gunpowder went into action.
Dave could not imagine what had happened. He thought that possibly the Indians had captured the gunpowder and exploded it purposely, but he did not dare to emerge from his hiding.
There was an interval of silence. There were no more war-whoops, and he concluded that the Indians had departed. They had, but not exactly in the manner that Dave imagined.