“Gorry!—There they go! Steady, Blaze!” he gritted through his clenched teeth and then raised the rifle. The army carbine’s sights sought out the game swiftly. Sid had filed a forty-five degree cut on the front sight, so that it showed up as a little white mirror over the flat bar of his rear sight. Cutting the mirror square in two with the rear bar, he found the galloping ram and raised it up to just under the distant shoulder of the Big-Horn.
Sid was just on the point of pressing the trigger—indeed had already felt the first movement of the creep of its bolt action—when a bright, shiny, horizontal flash,—the flash of an arrow—shot across the gray slopes of the ridge opposite! The ram staggered, stumbled, and struggled up a ledge, pawing convulsively with his hoofs. A second and a third arrow flash swept across the hillside and stopped in the ram’s flank. Sid gasped with astonishment. Those flashes were arrows! Then he grabbed Blaze’s collar instinctively, put down the rifle hurriedly, and closed his fingers around the dog’s muzzle so that he could not bark.
Sid was too nonplussed for a moment to speak. Arrows! It could not be Niltci, for the Navaho boy had long since abandoned his bow, now that his white friends kept him in unlimited cartridges. Sid watched the ram in his death struggles, not daring to move so much as his head. Those arrows had been shot by some unknown Indian. These mountains were inhabited then. He could see the two ewes tearing wildly down the arroyo toward a grim and scowling lava field that lay far below. They disappeared around a corner of granite, some distance down, but still the Indian who had fired the arrows did not come out of his hiding place.
Who could he be? Sid knew that the Papagoes had long since abandoned this hunting ground. Their tank still remained, filled eternally from season to season with rainfall, the sole reminder of that time when the tribe used to gather here to drive the sheep and antelope into the craters and slaughter them wholesale in the trap thus set. Now the Papagoes had become a pastoral people, raising corn, selling baskets, receiving their beef rations from a beneficent government, which, however, kept them virtually prisoners on two small reservations. This Indian arrow-shooter might be a wandering Yaqui from Mexico, but that was hardly possible. It would go hard with him if caught on this side of the border by any of our rangers!
Why did he not come out? Sid was sure that it was because he had heard Blaze’s bark coming up the mountain, followed by the appearance of those hunted sheep. He was lying low.
For what? To shoot down the hunter the same way that he had laid low the ram? Well, if he had to wait all day, he would not be that victim, Sid decided, then and there!
And meanwhile the ram lay a silent, pathetic heap of horns and hoofs, lonely under the hot sun, surrounded by the gray crags and green acacias that had been his home—while the enigma of his death remained still inscrutable. A stunted green saguarro rose near where he had fallen, a marking-post of the desert; the approach below him was guarded by a sturdy choya, to stumble into which would be agony.
For a long time Sid stood watching the place where the arrows had seemed to come from, undecided what to do next. There was a craggy boulder over there, jutting out from the hillside, and behind it strung out cover in the shape of creosote bushes and rocky fastnesses of jumbled granite. But nothing moved. The unknown Indian still lay hidden, watching that ram carcass, too, like a trap set ready to spring. Sid lowered his head slowly, inch by inch, determined to play this waiting game to a finish himself. His muscles were trembling from holding his fixed poise so long and the under tendon of his right knee ached.
It had never occurred to him that he was in any danger himself—when suddenly a savage growl rumbling in Blaze’s throat caused him to turn halfway to the right. Instantly came the twang of a bow and the sharp hiss of an arrow. Blaze bawled out in pain, then sprawled out flat, with all four of his furry paws spread out like woolly broom handles, while his pained eyes looked up piteously to Sid. An arrow transfixed him above his shoulders. The dog seemed paralyzed as Sid dropped beside him, hot anger welling up in his heart. A hurt to one’s own person does not cause a whiter rage than one done to a dumb pet! Sid peered about him, seeking with glittering eye for something to fire at. Beside him Blaze moaned, sighed deeply, and then fell over stiffly, the arrow sticking in the rock and partly supporting him. Sid hesitated to pull it out. To start the blood spurting free now would kill whatever chance he had yet for life—if he were not already gone.
It seemed a most cruel shot, to Sid. Why had the Indian spared him and shot his dumb and faithful companion instead? Then he began to glimpse signs of wily red strategy in all this. The unknown enemy intended to capture him alive if possible! With Blaze at his side it could not be done by any creeping attack, for the dog’s keen nose would immediately detect the near presence of any person whatever.