“It is the favorite resort of the Death Riders—and a strong place. They are a gang of cutthroats and outlaws, sir—one of the worst in the West. I know them only too well! They have seen these signals, and the men probably think they are signs of their own comrades.
“They’ll be moving down to help them, too. Whatever gang are fighting over there will get help from them if they are fighting Buffalo Bill. They hate him so bitterly that they would gladly risk their lives on the chance of wiping him out.”
“Then we will move on. If there is a fight going on, the sooner we get into it, the better.”
And the captain at once put his command to a trot.
CHAPTER XXII.
WHITE RUFFIANS.
May and Gertrude had now been for three days in the power of the Ute chief, and so far, though closely watched and guarded, they had not been badly treated.
He seemed to have complete control over his braves, and as band after band joined him in answer to the signal smokes he sent up and the scouts he sent out, until he had gathered a large party, this was very remarkable. For discipline in an Indian tribe is as much to be expected as it is in a newly recruited regiment of volunteers, where every private feels as big as his captain, and sometimes bigger, having no responsibility to settle him down.
But how long this kind treatment would last the poor girls did not know, for the chief and his brother often spoke of them as their squaws to be, when the present war trail was at an end.