Day had scarcely dawned again when the traitor stole out to inspect his surroundings. All the warriors slept, even to the guards, who, as they sat about the ashes of the fires, nodded over the guns in their laps. The only ones astir were a few Indian mothers, who were already lashing their babies to the travaux strapped to their lean dogs. The traitor had mounted a rugged bluff that overhung the canyon leading back into the valley where the temporary encampment was made, and straining his eyes to the farthest distance he saw what he yearned to see, a long line of mounted men. Rations were destined to be regular and his heart was glad. Without a backward glance toward the camp he started on a run in the direction of the approaching horsemen.
In the valley the band slumbered on. The fagged ponies nipped the grass. The squaws moved quickly to and fro among the tents. Then one of the dozing sentries awoke with a start and stood erect. Black against the crimson disk of the rising sun he saw the solitary figure of a man; and even as he gazed another and another filed into view. He knew they were mounted men, though a rise in the ground hid the horses from his sight. While he stood looking at them in stupid and speechless amazement, they wheeled over the intervening hillock with the sharp clang of steel on stirrup iron, and with a wild hurrah raced down the hill upon the camp. What the savages first knew, roused from their sleep, was that a hundred men were riding furiously among the tents with blazing carbines. The surprise was so complete that the Indians offered no resistance; those who could, men, women and children, rushed toward the ponies, stimulated by a vague hope that they might escape; and as they ran they were shot down.
Foremost among those who strove to reach the horses was Le Boyen. His war pony, saddled and bridled in constant readiness for alarms, grazed apart from the tired mounts of his party. He reached and threw himself astride of it, and with a yell whirled through the ranks of the slaughtering whites. In the stupendous strain of the few short seconds while he was flying through their midst he was absolute master of himself, and in a cloud of dust and smoke, a score of men firing at his half-naked figure, he dashed up the trail unscathed, away from the horror of total annihilation that lurked in the valley.
Ahead of him the trail dipped into a narrow bottom. Crossing this it wound up a steep ascent and disappeared in a rocky gorge. Le Boyen gained the bottom and the partial cover of its timber, when his horse stumbled. He drew it up with a savage jerk. The next instant it collapsed in a heap under him. He cleared his feet from the stirrups and leaped from the saddle, and with his cartridge belt in one hand and his rifle in the other, plunged through the brush toward the ascent. At his back the mounted men came crashing through the timber, and as Le Boyen sprang out of the cover and bounded up the ascent, the bullets of his pursuers flecked up the earth at his feet; but he gained the entrance of the gorge in safety, and threw himself down behind the first shelter that offered, a great square of granite.
He had his revolvers to fall back upon, so he emptied the magazine of his repeater. When the smoke cleared away he saw that his fire had been eminently successful. Two men lay dead at the base of the ascent, and a third, wounded, was endeavoring to crawl away. Le Boyen knew that his case was hopeless. He wondered what was back of him, if it were not possible to enter the gorge farther along. In fancy he saw his own hurried rush for a fresh cover. It would be the last episode in the clenching of a victory destined in point of conclusiveness to be little short of a massacre.
A medley of sounds came from the camp. He heard the voices of the white men; an occasional order given; the piteous yelping of the dogs; now and then a stray shot. A glance in the direction of the valley told him what this last meant: the soldiers were shooting the dogs, who, faithful to their tiny charges, would not allow the white men to approach them. Wary and thoroughly frightened, they circled about the camp, stopping at intervals to howl dismally. An officer had suggested the expedient of shooting the dogs as the only means of saving the babies; but this was not proving successful, for sometimes the dogs moved at the wrong moment or the soldier's aim would prove uncertain, and the baby and not the dog would be shot.
In the timbered bottom a gray-haired colonel was listening to the reports of several soldiers, who, according to the fertility of their imagination, variously estimated that there were from ten to twenty Indians secreted among the rocks.
“Then they are very saving of their ammunition,” commented the colonel dryly. He turned to the-officer at his side: “What do the scouts say, Captain? Is there any way of getting at the rear of the redskins?”
“Yes, Colonel.”
“How long will it take?”