“It was a lucky shot, brother,” said Red Cloud. “The arrows of the Cave Dwellers are almost always poisoned, and the slightest scratch with one of them is likely to kill a man. If the first arrow they fired had struck me, I should now be roaming the happy hunting grounds of the Great Manitou.”
“Who are they, and why did they attack us?” asked Buffalo Bill, after he had satisfied himself that the savage he had shot was really dead.
“They are the Cave Dwellers,” replied the Indian, “and they attacked us because they have a mortal feud with my tribe, and especially with myself. It is a long story, brother, but it were well that you should know it.”
“Let me get rid of the body first,” remarked Buffalo Bill. “If I leave it here, the coyotes and buzzards will come around pretty soon and trouble us. See! they are beginning to circle already.”
He pointed overhead, where several vultures were circling in whirls that approached constantly nearer to the ground.
With his strong, broad-bladed bowie knife, the scout hollowed out a grave a few feet deep in the loose, sandy earth, and placed the body of the dead savage in it. Over the shoveled-in earth he rolled a number of heavy stones, so that the coyotes would be unable to dig up the body.
Having thus given his slain enemy decent sepulture, the border king returned to the hut and prepared a meal for himself and his patient. As they sat smoking their pipes, after they had finished the repast, he asked Red Cloud for the story of his feud with the Cave Dwellers.
Red Cloud thought a moment, and then began:
“They are the old people, these Cave Dwellers—the oldest people in all this country. They are older than the Moquis, or the Piutes, or the Navahos, or the Apaches. They were here from the beginning of time, but when the other tribes came into the country they were driven to take refuge in great caves far up on the sides of the mountains, where hardly a goat can climb.