Buffalo Bill's Pursuit; Or, The Heavy Hand of Justice

by Prentiss Ingraham

The mountain was steep, and he had left his horse near its base, climbing himself to the rugged spot where he now stood. He was trapped. Where he stood there was a narrow space of rock, on the edge of the precipice; in front of him a small space of needle-covered ground still untouched by fire; and beyond that a very furnace of flame and smoke. The roar of the fire was terrifying of itself, and now and then the fall of a burned tree trunk thundered through it, like the crash of a cannon shot.

“My own fault, too!” he said, as he looked about, searching vainly for some avenue of escape. “I don’t know that I slept so soundly that the fire got such a start as that. I suppose I must have thought it the roar of the river.”

But Buffalo Bill could not be quite sure that all the fault was with himself. For, who had started the fire? He had deadly enemies in that country, men who would have roasted him there as coolly as they would have roasted a plucked partridge.

But Buffalo Bill was not really troubling his mind so much about the origin of the fire as how he could escape from it. He ran along the edge of the precipice, looking down.

The lariat that might have helped him he had left on the saddle, with the horse.

Twenty feet below him, on the side of the precipice, was a ledge; but he could not get down to it, for the wall above it was as smooth as a board, and glassy in its slipperiness. To jump down to that ledge would be the same as deliberately committing suicide; for the ledge was narrow, and the drop sheer, so that he would only have bounded, or fallen, on down into the black cañon, if he had tried it. He could see the white water roaring and racing far below; and could even see other ledges and shelves that he might reach if he could only get down to that first one.

Seeing that he could not climb down the sheer wall, he turned, and again faced the fire.

Even in the few brief moments spent in inspecting the ledge, the fire had gained in a startling way, and was now much closer and much hotter than before. It roared and glowed in a big semicircle, the two ends of the semicircle resting on the rim of the precipice and traveling fast toward him. That he would be roasted alive if he remained admitted of not a doubt; as even now, at the distance, the heat of the fire was almost unbearable.

A strange look, perhaps never before seen on the face of the indomitable scout, came to it, and he took out his revolver. For the instant he felt that he preferred to shoot himself rather than to suffer the tortures of a living death by fire. But he shook his head, thrust back the revolver, and turned again to the rim of the precipice.

“Perhaps I could tear up my clothes and make a rope that would reach part way to the ledge, and I could drop the rest of the distance,” was his thought. “I’ll try it; for I’ll die here if I don’t, and I’d prefer to die trying to do something.”