The Covered Wagon by Emerson Hough (ebook reader play store .TXT) 📖

sun save for one purpose--to overtake this party at the ford.

"It's Bill Jackson!" exclaimed Caleb Price, rifle in hand, at the river's edge. "Look out, men! Don't shoot! Wait! There's fifty Indians back of him, but that's Jackson ahead. Now what's wrong?"

The riddle was not solved even when the scout of the Missouri train, crowded ahead by the steady rush of the shouting and laughing savages, raised his voice as though in warning and shouted some word, unintelligible, which made them hold their fire.

[pg 242]

The wild cavalcade dashed into the stream, crowding their prisoner--he was no less--before them, bent bows back of him, guns ready.

They were stalwart, naked men, wide of jaw, great of chest, not a woman or child among them, all painted and full armed. "My God, men!" called Wingate, hastening under cover. "Don't let them in! Don't let them in! It's the Crows!"

[pg 243]

CHAPTER XXXI -HOW, COLA!

"How, cola!" exclaimed the leader of the band of Indians, crowding up to the gap in the corral where a part of the stock had just been driven in. He grinned maliciously and made the sign for "Sioux"--the edge of the hand across the throat.

But men, rifles crosswise, barred him back, while others were hurrying, strengthening the barricade. A half dozen rifles, thrust out through wheels or leveled across wagon togues, now covered the front rank of the Crows; but the savages, some forty or fifty in number, only sat their horses laughing. This was sport to them. They had no doubt at all that they would have their will of this party of the whites as soon as they got ready, and they planned further strategy. To drive a prisoner into camp before killing him was humorous from their point of view, and practical withal, like driving a buffalo close to the village before shooting it.

But the white men were not deceived by the trading-post salutation.

"He's a liar!" called out the voice of Jackson. "They're not Sioux--they're Crows, an' out for war! Don't let 'em in, boys! For God's sake, keep 'em out!"

[pg 244]

It was a brave man's deed. The wonder was his words were not his last, for though the Crows did not understand all his speech, they knew well enough what he meant. One brave near him struck him across the mouth with the heavy wooden stock of his Indian whip, so that his lips gushed blood. A half dozen arrows turned toward him, trembling on the strings. But the voice of their partisan rose in command. He preferred a parley, hoping a chance might offer to get inside the wagon ring. The loose stock he counted safe booty any time they liked. He did not relish the look of the rifle muzzles at a range of twenty feet. The riders were now piled in almost against the wheels.

"Swap!" exclaimed the Crow leader ingratiatingly, and held out his hand. "How, cola!"

"Don't believe him! Don't trust him, men!"

Again Jackson's voice rose. As the savages drew apart from him, to hold him in even better bow range, one young brave, hideously barred in vermilion and yellow, all the time with an arrow at the prisoner's back, the men in the wagon corral now saw that Jackson's hands were tied behind his back, so that he was helpless. But still he sat his own horse, and still he had a chance left to take.

"Look out!" he called high and clear. "Get away from the hole! I'm comin' in!"

Before anyone fully caught his meaning he swung his horse with his legs, lifted him with his heels and made one straight, desperate plunge for the gap, jostling aside the nearest two or three of his oppressors.

[pg 245]

It was a desperate man's one hope--no hope at all, indeed, for the odds were fifty to one against him. Swift as was his movement, and unprepared as his tormentors were for it, just as the horse rose to his leap over the wagon tongue, and as the rider flung himself low on his neck to escape what he knew would come, a bow twanged back of him. They all heard the zhut! of the arrow as it struck. Then, in a stumbling heap, horse and rider fell, rolled over, as a sleet of arrows followed through.

Jackson rolled to one side, rose to his knees. Molly Wingate chanced to be near. Her scissors, carefully guarded always, because priceless, hung at her neck. Swiftly she began to saw at the thong which held Jackson's wrists, bedded almost to the bone and twisted with a stick. She severed the cord somehow and the man staggered up. Then they saw the arrow standing out at both sides of his shoulder, driven through the muscles with the hasty snap of the painted bowman's shot.

"Cut it--break it!" he demanded of her; for all the men now were at the edge, and there was no one else to aid. And staunch Molly Wingate, her eyes staring again in horror, took the bloody stem and tried to break it off, in her second case of like surgery that week. But the shaft was flexible, tough and would not break.

"A knife--quick! Cut it off above the feather!"

He himself caught the front of the shaft and pushed it back, close to the head. By chance she saw Jed's knife at his belt as he kneeled, and drew it. Clumsily but steadily she slashed into the shaft, weakened it, broke it, pushed the point forward. Jackson himself unhesitatingly pulled it through, a gush of blood following on either side the shoulder. There was no time to notice that. Crippled as he was, the man only looked for weapons. A pistol lay on the ground and he caught it up.

[pg 246]

But for the packs and bales that had been thrown against the wheels, the inmates of the corral would all have fallen under the rain of arrows that now slatted and thudded in. But they kept low, and the Indians were so close against the wagons that they could not see under the bodies or through the wheels. The chocks had not yet been taken out from under the boxes, so that they stood high. Against such a barricade cavalry was helpless. There was no warrior who wanted to follow Jackson's example of getting inside.

For an instant there came no order to fire. The men were reaching into the wagons to unsling their rifles from the riding loops fastened to the bows. It all was a trample and a tumult and a whirl of dust under thudding hoofs outside and in, a phase which could last no more than an instant. Came the thin crack of a squirrel rifle from the far corner of the wagon park. The Crow partisan sat his horse just a moment, the expression on his face frozen there, his mouth slowly closing. Then he slid off his horse close to the gap, now piled high with goods and gear.

[pg 247]

A boy's high quaver rose.

"You can't say nothing this time! You didn't shoot at all now!"

An emigrant boy was jeering at his father.

But by that time no one knew or cared who shot. The fight was on. Every rifle was emptied in the next instant, and at that range almost every shot was fatal or disabling. In sudden panic at the powder flare in their faces, the Crows broke and scattered, with no time to drag away their wounded.

The fight, or this phase of it, was over almost before it was begun. It all was one more repetition of border history. Almost never did the Indians make a successful attack on a trading post, rarely on an emigrant train in full corral. The cunning of the Crow partisan in driving in a prisoner as a fence had brought him close, yes--too close. But the line was not yet broken.

Firing with a steady aim, the emigrants added to the toll they took. The Crows bent low and flogged their horses. Only in the distant willow thickets did they pause. They even left their dead.

There were no wounded, or not for long. Jackson, the pistol in his hand, his face gray with rage and pain, stepped outside the corral. The Crow chief, shot through the chest, turned over, looked up dully.

"How, cola!" said his late prisoner, baring his teeth.

And what he did with this brave he did with all the others of the wounded able to move a hand. The debt to savage treachery was paid, savagely enough, when he turned back to the wagons, and such was the rage of all at this last assault that no voice was raised to stay his hand.

[pg 248]

"There's nothing like tobacker," asserted Jackson coolly when he had reëntered the corral and it came to the question of caring for his arrow wound. "Jest tie on a good chaw o' tobacker on each side o' that hole an' 'twon't be long afore she's all right. I'm glad it went plumb through. I've knowed a arrerhead to pull off an' stay in when the sinew wroppin's got loose from soakin'.

"Look at them wrists," he added, holding up his hands. "They twisted that rawhide clean to the bone, damn their skins! Pertendin' to be friends! They put me in front sos't you'd let 'em ride up clost--that's the Crow way, to come right inter camp if they can, git in close an' play friends. But, believe me, this ain't but the beginnin'. They'll be back, an' plenty with 'em. Them Crows ain't west of the Pass fer only one thing, an' that's this wagon train."

They gathered around him now, plying him with questions. Sam Woodhull was among those who came, and him Jackson watched narrowly every moment, his own weapon handy, as he now described the events that had brought him hither.

"Our train come inter the Sweetwater two days back o' you all," he said. "We seed you'd had a fight but had went on. We knowed some was hurt, fer we picked up some womern fixin's--tattin', hit were--with blood on hit. And we found buryin's, the dirt different color."

[pg 249]

They told him now of the first fight, of their losses, of the wounded; told him of the near escape of Molly Wingate, though out of courtesy to Woodhull, who stood near, they said nothing of the interrupted wedding. The old mountain man's face grew yet more stern.

"That gal!" he said. "Her shot by a sneakin' Rapahoe? Ain't that a shame! But she's not bad--she's comin' through?"

Molly Wingate, who stood ready now with bandages, told him how alike the two arrow wounds had been.

"Take an' chaw tobacker, ma'am," said he. "Put a hunk on each side, do-ee mind, an' she'll be well."

"Go on and tell us the rest," someone demanded.

"Not much to tell that ye couldn't of knew, gentlemen," resumed the scout. "Ef ye'd sont back fer us we'd of jined ye, shore, but ye didn't send."

"How could we send, man?" demanded Woodhull savagely. "How could we know where you were, or whether you'd come--or whether you'd have been of any use if you had?"

"Well, we knew whar you-all was, 't any rate," rejoined Jackson. "We was two days back o' ye, then one day. Our captain wouldn't let us crowd in, fer he said he wasn't welcome an' we wasn't needed.

"That was ontel we struck the big Crow trail, with you all a follerin' o' hit blind, a-chasin' trouble as hard as ye could. Then he sont me on ahead to warn ye an' to ask ef we should jine on. We knowed the Crows was down atter the train.

[pg 250]

"I laid down to sleep, I did, under a sagebrush, in the sun, like a fool. I was beat out an' needed sleep, an' I thought I was safe fer a leetle while. When I woke up it was a whoop that done hit. They was around me, laughin', twenty arrers