As he lighted the fuse I sprang out of the way of the recoil and for the first time looked ahead. Out of the dusk of the morning, less than a hundred yards away, a horde of warriors were coming toward us swiftly yet with cautious, catlike steps. There was something terribly sinister in their approach, far more so than if they had come with the usual war songs and shouts of an Indian attack. Boom! went the cannon. The flash of it blinded us; the smoke drifted into our faces. Lem, who was carrying our rifles in his arms, shouted to us to take them.
"No! Lay 'em down! Help load! Where's the powder for this gun?" Abbott yelled.
"Right here!" cried my uncle as he and Tsistsaki and a couple of other women joined us. "Use your rifles!"
We snatched them from Lem, and, lo! as the smoke drifted away we could see no one to shoot at, nor could we hear anything but the hollow murmur of the river, as if it were mocking us.
"By gum! They've just flew away!" Lem exclaimed.
"Not they!" said my uncle, proceeding to thrust a charge powder into the cannon and ram it home. "Just step over to the river-bank and look down, and you'll see them."
"Ha! So that's their scheme, is it? Goin' to shut us off from water! I might have knowed it! What beats me is, why didn't they come on? If they had, 't would have been all over with us in about two minutes!" said Lem.
"What say they?" Pitamakan asked me, and I told him.
The Mandans and the engagés now came to us from the other side of the stockade, with the women and children trailing after them.
"The cut-throats ran down over the river-bank," old Lame Wolf signed to my uncle.