The moment the darkness had wiped Judd out of sight the wary scout turned eastward from the trail. The brush was thick and hung heavy with the dew of the mountains—and that might as well be rain. Every twig he touched communicated to its parent branch a shiver that showered him like a patent bath. He kept the lock of his magazine rifle under his armpit, pulled down the brim of his sombrero to shield his face, and walked swiftly on for some few yards. Yet he made wonderfully little noise.
Having begun to climb rising ground, he here bore off toward the gorge, or cañon. If Oak Heart had laid an ambush there, the reds would be hiding in the brush, behind logs, and sheltered by boulders, all along the sidehills for some hundreds of yards. Buffalo Bill proposed to make a wide enough détour to get well behind the ambushed foe.
By chance, however, he came suddenly upon a slope of gravel and sand, and stepped upon it before he realized the shifting nature of the soil. A stream of small pebbles began rattling down the hill!
Instantly Buffalo Bill learned that his suspicions had been well founded. The Indians were there.
He heard a startled grunt below him. Then in Sioux a voice asked a brief question.
“Bear?” returned a second Indian.
There was a sound as though one of the speakers had risen from his place. Buffalo Bill cast his mind quickly over the situation. The suggestion that a bear might be lurking about the sidehill seemed the most reasonable. A bear is notably a blundersome beast, and the wind was not from the ambushed redskins. The scout grasped the idea.
He sent another small avalanche of gravel down the slope, and then floundered a bit in the brush. His ability to imitate the voices of birds and animals was very keen; but it is not easy to imitate the gruff, startled “woof!” of the marauding bear. However, he essayed it and then stamped away up the hill through the brush, making a deuce of a clatter till he reached an open space. He hoped that the reds would take his play-acting in good faith; yet he could not help having his doubts. He considered that, had he been in their place, he would have felt strong doubt regarding the validity of the sound, and would have investigated.
Therefore he slipped behind an enormous tree trunk at the edge of this opening and waited to see if the supposed bear would be followed. Minute after minute passed, and a deathlike silence reigned upon the hillside. Buffalo Bill was wasting time, but he was too wary to approach closer to the Indians—near enough to learn their numbers at least—until he was assured that his first mistake had not borne perilous fruit.
Sharp as his hearing was, however, he did not hear a footfall, or a breath; yet of a sudden a figure was silhouetted before him against the open space in the forest. An Indian stood there with folded arms, his back to the scout, and facing the clearing!