“A sneaking red thief has crawled right up under my nose and stolen my horse and Buffalo Bill’s,” he ground between his teeth.
To think of retaking the horses was next to a hopeless task. Perhaps they had been gone half an hour—long enough for an Indian to have led them beyond hearing and then galloped several miles.
“What will Cody think?” was the thought uppermost in Hickok’s mind. “He’ll think I went to sleep and let the redskins get away with the horses without so much as ‘by your leave.’”
And then the plainsman’s mind was settled.
“I’ll bring those horses or I’ll never come back,” he said in a low tone, for all the Laramie man’s determination was aroused.
He tore the lariat pin from the ground, pulled the piece of rope from the pin, and stuffed it into his pocket. He then searched for the other, found it, and served it in the same way.
“I won’t leave those telltale things behind,” he said.
At first Hickok attempted to pick up and follow the trail, but in the heavy pall of darkness he found that impossible, as he knew beforehand it would be. Then he started toward the nearest point where a signal light had flared. He proceeded carefully, aware that at any moment he might blunder upon a group of silent savages in the grass. Once a whirr at his side caused him to bound away from a cactus, where he had disturbed a rattler.
Frequently he stumbled in the open doorways of prairie-dog villages, and at another time a wriggling thing under his foot felt as large as a cat. It was probably a bull snake, which, cloyed with its early evening meal, had been taking a nap in the pathway of the lone plainsman.
After probably two hours of this, Hickok seemed to have reached the rim of a little valley, for there, seemingly far below him, were the twinkling fires of an Indian encampment.