With Sully into the Sioux Land

by Joseph Mills Hanson

Al, being strong and quick, was soon abreast of the Captain. He was just pulling himself up on hands and knees over a ledge when he saw a tall, broad-shouldered Indian step into view from behind a rock not thirty feet ahead and raise his rifle to fire. As he stood, his left side was turned slightly toward Al, and what the latter saw as he looked made him gasp as though he had been struck in the face. A long, livid scar ran down the cheek and neck of the savage and out upon his shoulder.

He was just pulling himself up

For an instant Al's head swam, as he realized that before him stood Te-o-kun-ko, the captor of his brother Tommy. Then, with no thought in his mind other than that he must catch up with the Yanktonais and demand his brother, he began running and climbing ahead again with frantic energy. The Indian had fired and disappeared; but to Al's excited imagination it seemed almost as if in overtaking him he would overtake Tommy himself. He paid no heed to Captain Miner and his men nor to Wallace Smith, who had joined them, all of whom were shouting to him to come back. He leaped over the rock where Te-o-kun-ko had stood but the warrior was not in sight. He ran up a little, steep depression beyond and swung around a tree-trunk at its head. An Indian behind a stone a few feet to one side, who had not noticed him so far in front of the line, gave him a terrified glance and fled like a rabbit. Al did not pause to fire at him; but another warrior on his opposite side sent a bullet so close that the wind of it brushed his face sharply, and he stopped long enough to reply with his revolver; whereupon the savage dived between two boulders and vanished. Al rushed on, totally oblivious of the fact that he was getting far within the retreating Indian lines.

Just then, in climbing over a boulder, his foot slipped and he pitched forward and rolled into the narrow crevice between two rocks beyond, where, for a moment, he was held securely, despite his struggles. He twisted himself around in an effort to grasp a point of the stone above him, and found himself staring into the face of Te-o-kun-ko, hardly fifteen feet away, looking at him down the barrel of his rifle.

"Te-o-kun-ko! Wait!" shouted Al. "Te-o-kun-ko, where is Tommy,—Tommy Briscoe?"

The tense muscles of the Indian's features relaxed. His finger did not press the trigger which would have forever ended Al's search. Across his face came an expression of intense bewilderment, mixed, it seemed to Al's fascinated gaze, with grief or remorse. The levelled rifle barrel wavered and then sunk. He half turned away, hesitatingly, then looked again at Al with a keen, searching glance, as the latter lay helpless between the rocks. Finally, with a gesture half defiant and half despairing, he made a few quick, cat-like springs across the rocks and disappeared once more.

With a mighty effort Al succeeded in grasping the jutting point of the stone and drew himself up from the crevice. He was none too soon, for two Indians, whom he had distanced in his rapid climb, coming along the slope near him with guns evidently empty, saw him and leaped at him with clubbed muskets. He fired his revolver at one of them and missed, then jerked out his sabre and swung it in a left parry just in time to save his head from the blow of a musket butt. Three more warriors coming behind and afraid to shoot lest they hit their friends, came bounding down to join the hand-to-hand struggle.

In a few seconds more all would have been over but at this crucial instant the four men leading the wild scramble of the Coyotes after Al, caught up with him. They were Wallace, and Troopers Will Van Osdel, Lank Hoyt, and George Pike. Van Osdel leaped in beside Al, his sabre knocking the gun clear from the hands of one of the Indians, Hoyt crouched and fired his carbine at another, who sunk to the ground with a grunt, and Pike and Wallace, giving as loud a shout as they had breath for, climbed on after the remaining warriors, who had taken to their heels.