But Chief did not even lose his stride in going down, and at the bottom, in answer to a sharp tug on the rein, he turned and shot away along the trail after the disappearing White Antelope.
Oak Heart and his braves saw the act, and knew Cody’s reason for chasing the young squaw. Half the army of Sioux would have started in pursuit; but Dick Danforth’s troopers were sweeping down the hill by a smoother road, and would cut the Indians off from the entrance to the cañon. The reds were balked.
Dick Danforth’s blood was up. He had been born a Western boy, and, as he had intimated in his recent conversation with Cody, he had bitter reason to hate the redskins. He had been made an orphan, and his young life ruined, by these very Sioux.
He spoke to the bugler, and the wild notes of the charge rang out across the valley. Two score the troopers numbered, and there were five or six hundred Indians against them; but the bold fellows were ready to dash into the midst of the redskins.
Besides, Major Baldwin, seeing what desperate chances the troopers from Fort Resistence were taking, ordered Captain Ed. Keyes to charge with every able-bodied cavalryman the stockade contained. The fort gates were flung open, and out upon the Indians, already wavering and uncertain, charged Keyes and his troop, sabers in hand. They had no ammunition, but they wielded their sabers like fiends. The Indians, most of them unmounted, were borne down, trampled under the feet of the big cavalry horses, and slashed unmercifully on one side by Keyes, while Danforth came up on the other, his men shooting at short range with carbines and pistols, and finally taking to the sword also.
And while this wild carnage was in progress, Buffalo Bill and the White Antelope were racing along the trail in the cañon, the girl intent upon carrying her father’s message and arousing the redskins lying in ambush miles away, while the scout was just as determined that, without injuring her, she should be kept from carrying out her plan.
It was still dark down here in the cañon. Although the sun was already showing his red face above the eastern hills, as yet there was not light enough to dissipate the gloom at the bottom of this deep cut in the hills. Indeed, Buffalo Bill followed the girl more by sense of sound than sense of sight for the first half-mile.
Then the pace of the great white horse told. His stride was too much for the Indian pony, no matter how cruelly White Antelope lashed it. Steadily the scout drew nearer.
The gray light filtered down from above and showed to the scout the young squaw turning her head again and again to watch the progress of her pursuer. She was evidently measuring with fearful glance the rapidly lessening distance between them.
Buffalo Bill might easily have killed her as she leaned forward on her pony’s neck, urging him with whip and voice. His face was very set and stern, too; but the sternness was not that which masked his countenance when he was bent upon an enemy’s death.