When the talk which we had with them, through the interpreter, was ended, we had elicited many additional facts, to those already stated, in regard to our two encounters with them. The Sewall gun had been a hoodoo to them. Everyone who had used it had either been killed or been badly wounded.
When Freed heard this he was in high glee. For he had contended all the time that he had killed the first Indian who used the Sewall gun to shoot at the hunters, which was in the first encounter with them, in the stronghold at the edge of the Staked Plains. The second Indian who used the gun was badly wounded. Then Nigger Horse's son took it, and it was he that first used it, at our big fight, as we now called our 18th of March fight. And he too fell with the gun in his hands. Then Cinco Plumas, or Five Feathers, used it until near the close of the fight, when he too fell. The Indians said they left the Sewall gun in the tunneled sand-hills, wrapped up in a blanket with the two scalp-locks they had taken from Sewall. These superstitious creatures imagined the gun and scalp-locks were "bad medicine" for them; when, as a matter of fact, each one who used the gun placed himself in an exposed position in order to do effective work at long range. And, not being so well practiced in calculating distances as the hunters were, they laid all their misfortunes to the gun. We also learned that the looking-glass that Nigger Horse signaled with was smashed to smithereens by a bullet from one of our guns. A pappoose had been killed which was strapped to its mother's back. But this, of course, was because the pappoose happened to be where it was when the bullet passed along.
The next morning Captain Lee took up his march to Fort Griffin, where he was stationed, and the captives were sent on to Fort Sill.
On the 30th of April George Cornett came into Rath's and reported that John Sharp had been badly wounded the day before, near Double Mountain, and he wanted help to bring him in. The Indians had plundered his camp, cut the spokes out of his wagon, and run off his team. Louie Keyes, Cornett, Squirrel-eye, Hi. Bickerdyke, Joe Freed, Jim Harvey and myself took Rath's buggy team and went out after him. I drove the team; the others were on horseback.
We got to where Sharp was, in a brush thicket below his camp. We started back with him that night; came on back to the Double Mountain Fork; stopped to feed the horses and eat a cold lunch. We were now four miles from Rath. As the day-streaks were visible in the east on the morning of the first of May, 1877, we heard rapid firing in the direction of Rath's. We hooked the team to the buggy and all started for the place.
After going a mile or so, Harvey thought it best for some one to ride on rapidly to a high point about a mile ahead, and try to make out what it all meant. Squirlie, ever ready and ever present, fairly flew up the trail, and went to the summit of the high point where Rath's was in plain view, and much of the surrounding country also. One good, short look seemed to have satisfied him.
Back he came to us, on a dead run.
"Boys, they have tricked us. There are about seventy-five Injuns just over the hill," said he, as he pointed south. "They are going west to beat h—l, driving over 100 head of horses."
So, while we hurried on east as fast as we could go, "Keno," the O Z mare and Pinto were all going west.
When we arrived at Rath's we met a cheap-looking crowd. There were about fifty men there, all told, and, with two exceptions, all flat afoot. The Indians had made a clean job of this raid.