Our horses panted up the slope, groaning and grunting their protests at every whack of our ropes. We topped the rise, and Pitamakan's horse shied at a couple of robes lying close to the trail. Beyond, a couple of hundred yards away, we saw my uncle and his men running toward us; he stopped at sight of us and signed, "Go out! They went down off the end of the bluff!"
We loped to the end of the bank and looked down. It was not a perpendicular bluff; it sloped to the river at an angle of about eighty degrees. Two fresh streaks in the dark and crumbling surface showed where the cut-throats had slid down into the water.
We looked out upon the swift-running river, but could not see the men. Presently they appeared in the center fully three hundred yards downstream, swimming swiftly and powerfully toward the far shore. We sprang from our horses in order to take steady aim at them, but both dived before we could fire. Holding our weapons ready, we watched eagerly for them to reappear. But, incredible as it may seem, we never saw them again until they emerged on the shore five hundred yards below. They turned and waved their arms at us derisively, and then slowly walked into the willows that lined the edge of the river.
"Oh, how disappointed I am! When they turned back from us there at the top of the rise, I was sure that I should soon count another coup," Pitamakan lamented.
We turned now to meet the men who were hurrying toward us and who were almost winded by their steep climb. "Where are they?" my uncle gasped.
"Across the river!" I answered.
I happened to look off at our camp. "A rider is at the barricade," I said.
"Abbott, no doubt, quieting the women," said my uncle, and added in Blackfoot so that Pitamakan would understand, "Well, they killed the Curlew! Shot him in the back of the head, poor fellow!"
"Poor Louis! His troubles are over," I said. I was sorry that we were never again to hear him bewailing in his falsetto voice the loss of his pension and his endless other worries.
My uncle went on to explain to us just what had happened. The Assiniboins had climbed out of the valley in plain view of us, leaving two of their number, who were probably near relatives of Sliding Beaver, to avenge the chief's death. Those two had lain concealed in the thick willows at the upper end of the chopping. Arriving in the timber, all of our men except Louis, who had gone farther up in the grove to trim and cut into proper lengths a cottonwood that he had previously felled, had begun loading logs on the wagons. Then a gun had boomed right behind Louis; he had toppled over, dead, and the two cut-throats had rushed out to scalp him. The men had fired and had driven them back into the willows before they had accomplished their purpose, and they had run toward the river trail with my uncle and some of his men after them.