From each side of the gully half a dozen noosed riatas leaped out from the rocks.
The scout and the baron saw the flying nooses. One or two might have been dodged, but there was no getting away from twelve of them.
Buffalo Bill had barely time to jerk a revolver clear and fire in the direction of the rocks at the gully-side. The next moment he was roped and dragged bodily out of the saddle.
The noose had slipped part way down his body before it tightened, and when it closed on him it pinned his arms to his sides and rendered him helpless.
He struggled to the best of his ability, but a swarm of redskins dropped down on him and fairly smothered him by force of numbers.
Among the red faces bending over him he saw a white one. While the Apaches held him, the white man laid a handkerchief over the scout’s face.
The handkerchief was saturated with chloroform, and it was impossible for the scout to get away from the sense-destroying fumes of the drug.
Unconsciousness followed; and when the period of lethargy was finally broken, the scout sat up and stared about him into pitch-black night.
The drug, in clearing out of his faculties, had left a nausea in his stomach. From somewhere in the darkness the baron was groaning in the depths of a similar misery.