[CHAPTER VI.]
The Sioux forecasts our course—On the watch—Directions—We separate—Red Cloud is seen far out on the plains—Rival tactics—Scent versus sight—A captured scout—The edge of the hills again—The signal fire.
And now the reader must come back to our own camp, where we have all this time been comfortably settled for the night. The concluding portion of the Cree’s story had thoroughly alarmed the Sioux. From the few words in which the Cree had described the passing of the war-party, he had easily been able to put together all that was needful for thoroughly understanding the situation. His knowledge of the prairies, and his complete mastery of every detail of Indian thought and habit, made easy to him the task of tracking the further progress of the party, and guessing their whereabouts almost to exactness.
They were camped, he thought, only some seven or eight miles distant, in the same range of hills, and not far from where the level prairie bordered on the west the broken ground.
Of course he knew nothing of the arrival, in the camp of the war-party, of his deadly enemy, the trader; but he had long surmised the whereabouts of that individual to be not very remote, and from the information which he had gained when in the neighbourhood of the settlement, he was led to conjecture that the first large Indian camp he came to would have the trader as one of its inmates.
But as to the probable movements of the party, he formed a very correct anticipation. Their scouts would be sure to discover our camp at furthest on the morrow, even if they had not already done so; the Cree would prove to them too strong a temptation to be resisted, and the near presence of such good horses would be sure to give rise to some attempt at robbery. He did not communicate any of these thoughts to us, his companions, now. He determined to wait quietly until we were asleep, then to drive in the steeds, and to remain on watch until daybreak. With these precautions there would be little danger.
Departing quietly from the camp when our easy and regular respiration told him that we were asleep, he drove in the hobbled horses to the fire; then hobbling them so that the neck and forelegs were fastened together in addition to the fastening of the two forelegs, he withdrew to the shelter of a small thicket which commanded a view of the camp and its neighbourhood, and wrapping himself in his robe sat down, with his rifle between his knees and his dog beside him, to pass the night on guard.
How weary such a night to a white man! How slowly the long dark hours would roll by! How anxiously the first gleam of light would be looked for in the east! Not so with the red man; night after night will he thus sit, watching with eyes that never close, with ears that never deaden in their keen sense of sound. Sometimes in his lodge, sometimes as here in the thicket on the plain, thus will he sit hour after hour until the grey light steals into the east, grows broader over the sky, and the night is done.
At the first gleam of daylight Red Cloud moved gently back to camp, threw wood upon the fire, roused me from my slumbers, and got breakfast ready.