"Now," said Jim, "we will build up that side."
So we went to work and dragged up some small fallen trees from the slope below and with stones, large and small, built up a barricade.
It seemed to me that Jim exposed himself unnecessarily to the fire of the enemy. He seemed to be perfectly happy as the bullets hummed around him, as he put a rock in place on the parapet. In fact he seemed to mind them no more than the pouring rain.
It seemed like quite a little battle, with the rifle flashes from behind the brush or rocks and Jim's grey figure on the wall of the fort.
"That's all hunky dory," said Jim. "It beats old Fort Sumter."
"Get up Piute, Coyote," I urged. "They are safe here now as in the old cow pastures at home."
The ponies seemed to recognize that they were well protected, for they began to graze around as comfortably as you please in the little hollow with its surrounding rock, yanking at the bunches of tall grass and biting the leaves of the scrub bushes. Everything is fodder to a broncho.
"Let's get the saddles under shelter," said Jim.
So we dragged them down and put them in our camp under the big rock. Next we built a fire in the dry shelter and made coffee in a big tin cup we carried in our haversack.
Of course the grains were not as fine as though the original coffee had been run through a coffee mill, for we had pounded it up in a hollow cup-shaped rock with another stone for pestle.