“Him say he fight you with tomahawk—with knife—with revolver—with anything you like. But we not let him. You our friend. If a brave fight you here when you eat our meat, the face of my band is blackened.”
Running Water replied in this same strain to Black Panther, but he might as well have spoken to the wind.
Several of the braves—the more sober of them—supported their chief; but others wanted to see a fight, and they clamored to let Black Panther have his way. If the white man did not fight, they said, he was a coward.
Buffalo Bill caught this, for the word used was the same as in another dialect of the Sioux, which he knew.
He rose at once, repressing his anger with difficulty, and suggested to Running Water that he should wrestle with Black Panther. They need not fight a deadly duel, he urged, but they could at least see who was the better man.
The chief grasped eagerly at this proposal, for things were beginning to look serious, and bloodshed seemed imminent.
He translated Buffalo Bill’s challenge to Black Panther, and the latter fiercely accepted the suggestion.
He knew that he was far and away the best wrestler in the whole of the Sioux nation—the admitted champion of all the bands—and he had no doubt that he could vanquish his white opponent easily.
But he reckoned without his host, for he little knew that the king of the scouts had muscles as strong as steel, and had been trained in the art of wrestling from his youth up. So proficient, indeed, had he become in it that he had never yet met the redskin who could beat him—or the white man, either.
Black Panther stood up, naked to the waist, for the bout. He did not seem to be much affected by the quantity of whisky he had taken. His eye was clear, his attitude agile, and his movements as rapid as those of the animal from whom he had taken his name.