In less than half a minute after Wild Bill started upward, his head struck against a blanket covering the mouth of the shaft, and he was snaked out onto the planks, and lay blinking in the sun.
At the foot of the ore-dump stood the Ponca with a hand on the bridle of Wild Bill’s horse. The Laramie man saw in an instant what his red companion had done.
After covering the mouth of the shaft with his blanket, he had secured the picket-rope from Wild Bill’s saddle and had tied one end to the horn; the other end he had secured to the rope leading down into the shaft, and had then cut the shaft-rope. By leading Wild Bill’s horse across the cañon from the foot of the ore-dump, the Ponca had been able to get his white companion to the surface by horse-power.
“You’re all to the good, Crawling Bear!” declared Wild Bill, sitting up at the edge of the ore-dump and pulling off his coat. “I had a close call, down there, and I reckon those yaps would have got me if it hadn’t been for you.”
Crawling Bear untied the rope from the saddle-horn and began coiling it in. When he had removed the rope spliced to the end of the picket-rope, he hung the coil in its proper place at Wild Bill’s saddle.
“Wild Bill hurt, huh?” he asked, mounting the side of the dump.
“A gouge through the fleshy part of the arm, that’s all,” the Laramie man answered, examining the injury. “The bullet flickered along the muscles and went on about its business.”
Wild Bill had cut away the sleeve of his flannel shirt in order to examine the injury. Out of the bottom of the sleeve he improvised a bandage, and Crawling Bear helped him put it in place.
When the arm was roughly bandaged, Wild Bill thrust his hand into the breast of his shirt.
“I’m worth a dozen dead men yet,” he went on, “but that outfit sure had it in for me. Don’t know as I can blame them, though, as they’ve got a hundred thousand at stake. I’m going to fool them out of that hundred thousand—watch my smoke.”