Guided by Black Cloud, some of the boys and scouts a few days later located the spot where the Indians had found me unconscious, slowly freezing to death. From there they hunted in all directions, and at last found the two-storeyed hut—empty.
It was miles from the way I ought to have taken when I left the trapper’s shack, which showed that trying to guide my poor old horse was the worst thing I could have done.
Later, when the weather broke and I was able to get about, I got two of the boys to ride over to the hut with me.
My tale had sent search-parties scouring the countryside to try to run the would-be murderer down, but they never got him. What made the settlers and the sheriff more than keen to catch him was the gruesome discovery the two scouts and I made at the hut—three male skeletons, with their skulls smashed in, roughly buried in the earth! I thought of the iron bar and shuddered at my narrow escape.
Three years after I happened to stroll into a crowded court-house in San Jaleta, Southern Texas. A man was on trial for the murder of a lonely rancher, and seemed likely to be acquitted, for the evidence was too slight to convict him. There was no doubt that the motive of the crime had been robbery; and there was no doubt, when I’d had a good look at the prisoner, as to who he was. He was clean-shaven now, but, nevertheless, I remembered those awful eyes. Making my way to the front, I asked permission to give evidence for the prosecution.
After I had told my story—although it took five men to master the prisoner—the sheriff at last laid bare the scar on the neck where my vitriol had branded him the night of the storm.
Some of the crowd in court were pretty well worked up over the manner in which the lonely ranchman had been done to death, and the tale I told did not help to calm them. That night the jail at San Jaleta was “held up” by an armed mob, and when the sun rose it shone down on the body of a giant dangling from a telegraph pole at the end of a lariat.
That’s my story, and every word of it is true. I am afraid it’s taken a bit long in the telling, but I never hear the wind howling and moaning on a Christmas Eve as it does to-night without thinking of that other Christmas Eve on the Kansas plains so many years ago.