The distant thundering of many rifles, clear, though far away, came with a rumbling echo to their ears.
“Where is that same firing?” demanded the impatient Irishman. “Oh, there’s an illegant row going on somewheres around here, and I’m not there to take a hand. Och, where the divil is the foight?”
Frank leaped up to his seat and seized the telescope that lay in brackets alongside his driving-place.
In a moment he adjusted it, placed it to his eye, and slowly swept the plain with the powerful glass.
He saw, some four or five miles away to the right hand, the very trap Dwight had spoken of a few moments before.
Two narrow but high spurs of rock, closing in at one end and forming a blind pass; into this rocky trap a band of mounted men wore forcing an emigrant train, and from both sides came the thunder of the guns that they had heard.
He handed the glass to his companions, and they took in the scene at a glance through the lens.
“That damnable blind pass again,” said the avenger. “What will you do?”
“Not go to the fort again, anyhow,” said the inventor of the Steam Horse, as he took his seat. “I hold myself good for a tribe of red-skins, and, I reckon, to be able to scare a few white men, also, with my odd contrivance. Let me look again through the glass.”
When he looked again he found that the train was fairly into the trap, and that the outlaws of the plains—red or white—were forced to draw out of gunshot, for the emigrants were at bay.