“Well, I got behind a rock, and we had a lively time for a spell, them shooting at me and me shooting at them. The walls of the cañon was too steep for ’em to climb up and get behind me, but one of ’em climbed up part way, where he could get a sight of me, and a mighty good shot he was, considering what an awkward standing-place he had; the bullets kept a-pecking up the ground all around me as I lay flat behind my boulder; and whenever I tried to shoot back at him, all the others would blaze away at me.”
“Weren’t you frightened?” I asked, regarding him with the greatest interest.
“Scared blue,” replied the modest hero. “But I stood ’em off till dark, and then a party of cowboys come along and toted me out o’ there. After that I left that part of the country and come down here.”
“You were wounded, weren’t you?” inquired Jack.
“Why, yes. I had my left hand broke, and I was hit in five other places; but you see they didn’t know that, or they’d’a’ rushed the place, and then I’d’a’ bin a goner.”
The man told this brief tale in the quietest and most matter-of-fact way. He did not look for applause; he merely mentioned the matter because he had been asked to do so; and as to regarding himself as a hero, such an idea, seemingly, had never occurred to him.
As Jack said, in talking of him afterwards, there are two classes of frontiersmen: one whose members brag and talk and “swell around,” and do nothing, performing their deeds of heroism by word of mouth in the bar-rooms of the settlements; the other composed of those men who do things and say nothing—men whose deeds, courageous almost past the understanding of ordinary stay-at-home folks, are the beginning and the foundation of the stirring history of the Great West.
Our friend standing there by the fire was one of the latter; though no one suspected it less than he.
“Is there any danger from Indians between here and Bozeman?” asked Jack presently—a question of great moment to us, for it had been mutually agreed between us that we had no right to take any risk so serious as an encounter with Indians, and should our new friend reply in the affirmative we felt that our duty to our parents, to say nothing of our solicitude for our own safety, would compel us to hark back to the stage-road,—Squeaky or no Squeaky,—or even to abandon our expedition altogether. Tracker Jim therefore lifted a great weight from our minds when, in response to Jack’s inquiry, he said:
“No; not the way you intend to go, between the Tetons and the Henry River; especially so early in the year as this.”