With these words Cody shook hands with his pard and hastened away to where Chief was quietly feeding. In a moment he was riding hard away from the spot where the terrible tragedy had taken place.
Captain Keyes complied with Cody’s request, but was sorry that the scout had evidently gone on his mission of death—for the officer could look at the visit to the Indian encampment in no other light.
He had divided his force, as he said he should, and the vanguard went on to the coulée and buried the dead. All the redskins had been removed, and the place was deserted of the living. But when they came to search for Dick Danforth’s body, intending to remove it to the fort with them, it was not to be found. The brave lieutenant, for whose scalp Buffalo Bill had pleaded with White Antelope, had disappeared from the field of battle.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
RED KNIFE LOSES HIS “MEDICINE.”
At the time the fire burst out in the great forest and Buffalo Bill, the Border King, and his partner, Texas Jack, were chased by the flames, a young buck of Oak Heart’s tribe of Utah Sioux was likewise in the path of the flames. He had been out after a bear, because his father, an old brave now toothless and unable to follow in the chase, had expressed a desire for bear paws, roasted.
The government of Indian society is strictly patriarchal. The father of a family demands, and is accorded, the greatest respect. Besides, it is a trait of Indian character to care for and respect the aged. The aged men of the tribe usually mold its opinions in both peace and war.
Besides, Red Knife, as this young buck was named, was not a married man. He was what the whites would have called “an old bach.” He had no teepee of his own, but it was a notorious fact that he cast longing glances toward White Antelope, the cherished daughter of Oak Heart and the flower of the Sioux maidens. He had gone hunting for the bear because his father was fond of bear paws, but with the claws, and others in his possession, he hoped to make a cunning necklace that would be acceptable to the chief’s daughter.
Red Knife had lately become of moment in the tribe. It had been his hand that had finally felled the chief of the pony soldiers who were killed in the coulée, and whom Death Killer had tried to scalp. Red Knife hoped in time to become so important that the White Antelope would really look at him with favor, instead of ignoring him altogether.
The buck had obtained a single shot at his bearship, wounding him with a barbed arrow, and had driven him into a thicket toward the close of the day. Suddenly the smoke that had been hanging over the hilltops for hours swooped down upon the Indian and his quarry, and following the smoke came the fire—a deluge of flame!