"Two! Two of them are lying out there in the grass," I said. I had had my eyes upon them all the time I was reloading my rifle.
"Perhaps they are not dead; we'll go out and soon finish them off," Abbott proposed.
"You shall not!" my uncle exclaimed. But he was too late; Pitamakan was already over the barricade and running to the enemy that he had shot. We saw him stoop over the fallen man, then rise with a bow and a shield that he waved aloft with his free hand.
"I count coup upon this enemy. I call upon you, Far Thunder, and you, almost-brother, to witness that I take these weapons from this enemy that I have killed!"
"We hear you!" I answered.
"Far Thunder," he called to my uncle, "come and take the weapons of your kill!"
My uncle laughed. "I am past all that," he began, but never finished what he intended to say.
"Far Thunder, my man," Tsistsaki interrupted, "think how proud of you I shall be when those weapons out there are hung with the others that you have taken upon the walls of the home that we are building here! As you love me, go out and count your coup!"
So, to please her, and, I doubt not, with no little pride in what he had accomplished, my uncle went out to his fallen enemy and leaned over him; then, with a flintlock gun in his hand, he suddenly straightened up and cried, in the Blackfoot tongue, of course:
"I call upon you all to witness that I killed this man! I count coup upon one of our greatest enemies, a chief of the Assiniboins, Sliding Beaver!"