A wild yell drowned his last words, and again a volley was poured against the door.
The hunter sprung from the logs and snatched a torch from the fire.
“Dash me if they ain’t standing around the tree!” he exclaimed, his eyes lighting up with fierce triumph. “I’ll make a scatteration ’mong their ranks now, by Joshua! I will!”
He sprung toward a heavy tinned box which sat in one corner of the apartment, and threw back the lid with his left hand. The next moment he stepped back, thrusting the torch into the box as he executed the movement. A slight noise, like the explosion of a few grains of powder succeeded, and a white smoke rose from the recesses of the box.
But the noise that followed the explosion of the fuse was most terrific. It shook the cabin from gable to foundation and drove our young buffalo-hunter from the crevice by which he was standing. His eyes, too, were blinded by a bright light, and before the noise died away he heard the shrieks of Indians, frightened, wounded, and dying!
“By Joshua! it set the tree on fire!” cried the trapper, gazing at the large cottonwood, now terribly lacerated by the mine which so long had slept in its recesses.
From behind the magnificent trees, the Pawnees were now raining balls upon the cabin, and burning arrows were hissing toward the dry roof.
The destruction must have been fearful, for the burning tree revealed more than a score of forms, mangled and motionless, on the ground, while others, badly injured, were crawling from the spot.
“Listen!”
The dry stuff that formed the roof of the cabin was crackling beneath the blaze of the fiery arrows, and the object of the Pawnees to fire the cabin seemed at last attained.