He snatched the rifle which had fallen from the ill-fated boy’s hands, and then sprung to the black horse.
“They shan’t have Blackey!” he ejaculated, striking the animal’s rump with his open hand, and the next moment the horse was flying over the plains, free once more, but marked for life.
“Now for the river, boy!”
A wild yell broke from the Pawnees’ throats, as our friends sprung toward the stream, and the red-skins were seen urging their horses into a faster gait.
But they could not overtake the trapper and his protege, and at the brink of the river they halted, afraid to trust their jaded steeds to the mercies of the ingulfing sands.
“Poor Tecumseh!” sighed Frontier Shack, as he closed the cabin door and barricaded it firmly. “I feel like one who has lost his best friend. That horse was the only true friend Ote Shackelford ever had, and if he gits out o’ this scrape, he’s going to hunt Tecumseh till he finds him, dead or alive!”
George Long saw the trapper’s lips meet with terrible determination behind the last word, and his mind was called from the contemplation of Charley Shafer’s fate by the report of a score of rifles and the thud of bullets, as they buried themselves in the cottonwood logs.
“Fort Shackelford is attacked,” said the trapper, with a grim smile, “and the odds are somewhat enormous—two hundred against two.”
CHAPTER V.
RIFLE, FIRE AND LASSO.
Several minutes of silence followed the thud of the Pawnee bullets.