Immediately the Indians sent mounted messengers at speed from camp to camp,summoning all their people to witness the act of fierce self-doom;and soon the entire tribe of Cheyennes,many of them having their faces blackened in token of mourning,moved down and took up a position on the hill-side close to the agency.At the appointed hour both young men appeared in their handsome war dress,galloped to the top of the hill near the encampment,and deliberately opened fire on the troops.The latter merely fired a few shots to keep the young desperadoes off,while Lieutenant Pitcher and a score of cavalrymen left camp to make a circle and drive them in;they did not wish to hurt them,but to capture and give them over to the Indians,so that the latter might be forced themselves to inflict the punishment.
However,they were unable to accomplish their purpose;one of the young braves went straight at them,firing his rifle and wounding the horse of one of the cavalrymen,so that,simply in self-defence,the latter had to fire a volley,which laid low the assailant;the other,his horse having been shot,was killed in the brush,fighting to the last.All the while,from the moment the two doomed braves appeared until they fell,the Cheyennes on the hill-side had been steadily singing the death chant.When the young men had both died,and had thus averted the fate which their misdeeds would else have brought upon the tribe,the warriors took their bodies and bore them away for burial honors,the soldiers looking on in silence.Where the slain men were buried the whites never knew,but all that night they listened to the dismal wailing of the dirges with which the tribesmen celebrated their gloomy funeral rites.
Frontiersmen are not,as a rule,apt to be very superstitious.They lead lives too hard and practical,and have too little imagination in things spiritual and supernatural.I have heard but few ghost stories while living on the frontier,and these few were of a perfectly commonplace and conventional type.
But I once listened to a goblin story which rather impressed me.It was told by a grisled,weather-beaten old mountain hunter,named Bauman,who was born and had passed all his life on the frontier.He must have believed what he said,for he could hardly repress a shudder at certain points of the tale;but he was of German ancestry,and in childhood had doubtless been saturated with all kinds of ghost and goblin lore,so that many fearsome superstitions were latent in his mind;besides,he knew well the stories told by the Indian medicine men in their winter camps,of the snow-walkers,and the spectres,and the formless evil beings that haunt the forest depths,and dog and waylay the lonely wanderer who after nightfall passes through the regions where they lurk;and it may be that when overcome by the horror of the fate that befell his friend,and when oppressed by the awful dread of the unknown,he grew to attribute,both at the time and still more in remembrance,weird and elfin traits to what was merely some abnormally wicked and cunning wild beast;but whether this was so or not,no man can say.
When the event occurred Bauman was still a young man,and was trapping with a partner among the mountains dividing the forks of the Salmon from the head of Wisdom River.Not having had much luck,he and his partner determined to go up into a particularly wild and lonely pass through which ran a small stream said to contain many beaver.The pass had an evil reputation because the year before a solitary hunter who had wandered into it was there slain,seemingly by a wild beast,the half-eaten remains being afterwards found by some mining prospectors who had passed his camp only the night before.
The memory of this event,however,weighed very lightly with the two trappers,who were as adventurous and hardy as others of their kind.
They took their two lean mountain ponies to the foot of the pass,where they left them in an open beaver meadow,the rocky timber-clad ground being from thence onwards impracticable for horses.They then struck out on foot through the vast,gloomy forest,and in about four hours reached a little open glade where they concluded to camp,as signs of game were plenty.
There was still an hour or two of daylight left,and after building a brush lean-to and throwing down and opening their packs,they started up stream.The country was very dense and hard to travel through,as there was much down timber,although here and there the sombre woodland was broken by small glades of mountain grass.
At dusk they again reached camp.The glade in which it was pitched was not many yards wide,the tall,close-set pines and firs rising round it like a wall.On one side was a little stream,beyond which rose the steep mountain-slopes,covered with the unbroken growth of the evergreen forest.
They were surprised to find that during their short absence something,apparently a bear,had visited camp,and had rummaged about among their things,scattering the contents of their packs,and in sheer wantonness destroying their lean-to.The footprints of the beast were quite plain,but at first they paid no particular heed to them,busying themselves with rebuilding the lean-to,laying out their beds and stores,and lighting the fire.
While Bauman was making ready supper,it being already dark,his companion began to examine the tracks more closely,and soon took a brand from the fire to follow them up,where the intruder had walked along a game trail after leaving the camp.When the brand flickered out,he returned and took another,repeating his inspection of the footprints very closely.Coming back to the fire,he stood by it a minute or two,peering out into the darkness,and suddenly remarked:
