Chapter XII: Dropping the Mask

While Dave Farrell was deploying his forces for an attack upon the pass, he heard behind him the rattle of advancing hoofs, and quickly drew his men back into the shelter of the trees, for it might be an enemy. But, to his delight, the first man who rode out of the pass was Whirlwind, the Blackfoot, and behind him a hundred picked men of his nation. They had followed the outlaws after the repulse at the trapper camp, and attacked their rear, but they had taken shelter in one of the passes and had driven the Indians back. But, hearing the sound of the combat, Whirlwind, who was on his way to join his forces with those of Dave Farrell, at once turned back and now came on eager for the fray.

The reinforcement was needed, for the trappers were somewhat worn by the battles and skirmishes of the day. Dave rode out to meet the chief and greeted him warmly.

“My brother has fought well,” said the warrior, reproachfully; “but, why did he not wait for the Blackfeet, who seek revenge upon the Modoc Sioux and their friends?”

“We did not know where you were, chief,” replied Dave; “but we’ll give you fighting enough before we have done with this business, that I tell you. There is the enemy, but if you join us, you must fight as I tell you.”

“Whirlwind is not ashamed to fight under the Beaver Captain,” replied the chief. “He will listen to the words of wisdom.”

“Dismount your men and picket the horses here behind the woods. Five men will do to guard them.”

The order was promptly obeyed, and the Blackfeet advanced on foot. They were an active-looking, stalwart body of men, and Dave was delighted with their appearance.

“We are here,” cried Whirlwind. “Let the Beaver Captain tell us what to do, and we are ready.”

“Good!” replied Dave, adopting the laconic manner of the Indians. “Remember that Short Legs is a prisoner among our enemies, and be careful to do him no harm. Speak to your men and tell them this.”

The chief did so, and then drawing him aside, Dave gave him instructions how to proceed. His plan was to separate the Indians and send them up the hills to drive out the two parties detached by Rafe Norris to guard the flanks of his forces, and then assail them from the cliff, while the trappers attacked the front.

The Indian, pleased with the duty assigned him, quickly separated his men, placing one half under the command of a man whom he could trust, and then, keeping under cover of the strip of woods, marched to the right and left until they reached the confines of the valley, and began to steal up through the dark defiles, climbing from rock to rock, toward the place where the flanking-parties lay.

It was some time before these men understood the movement, but when they did so, every thing was done which men could do to make their position good. But the savages, sheltering themselves in every conceivable way, gradually closed in until scarcely a hundred yards separated them, when they rose from the cover and rushed in with hatchet and knife to do the work assigned them. A desperate struggle followed, hand to hand and foot to foot; but numbers triumphed, and of the twenty-two men who had been appointed to guard the flanks, only eight, and three of these wounded, reached the level where their comrades stood.

These had their hands full, for the trappers were advancing, firing as they ran, and a large party had already effected a lodgment among the scattered bowlders which lay about the mouth of the pass, while the Blackfeet were raining down every possible missile on the heads of the astounded British.

The Sioux, unable to stand the attack, were falling back in confusion, with great loss, and the whites opened to permit them to pass through, while they closed in sullenly to cover the retreat. Sadly thinned in numbers, the band showed a gallant front still, and walked calmly back, pausing now and then to take a shot at the Blackfeet on the rocks, who showed themselves at times, shaking the scalps they had taken in the air, and waking the echoes with their shouts of triumph.

“Look hyar; some one is going to git hurt if this goes on. You’d better let me loose,” Old Pegs said.

“I’ll see you skulped first,” roared Jim Diggs.

“Good-by, then,” replied Old Pegs, tauntingly, as he flung himself out of the saddle suddenly and sprung into a deep fissure which ran close beside the road. “I’m off!”

“Shoot him, durn ye, shoot!” yelled Diggs, as he emptied his revolver into the fissure up which the old hunter was climbing, his form scarcely distinguishable. A volley rattled upward and Old Pegs who had reached a ledge at least twenty feet above them threw up his hands and fell upon the ledge out of sight.

“Done fur!” said Jim, coolly. “He _would_ hev it, ye see. Jump up thar, Boston Jake, and lift his ha’r.”

The man was about to obey, but at this moment the trappers burst in upon them and Boston Jake was forced to go with the rest, and in some haste, for the bullets of the trappers, “deadly aimed and hot,” rattled through the crowded ranks. The slow retreat turned almost to a rout, long before they reached the mouth of the ravine, but at this moment, wild eyed and savage, Rafe Norris broke a way through the ranks of his own men and reached the front.

“Turn, curse you, turn!” he screamed, striking one of his own men a furious blow which brought him to the ground. “Turn, cowards and dogs! Never let it be said that you fled from such as these.”

There was certainly personal magnetism about this man, for those who were to all outward seeming beaten beyond recall, turned at his slightest word and for a moment bore back the rushing tide of the trappers. But the Blackfeet, creeping from ledge to ledge, again reached a place from which they could rain destruction on the heads of their enemies, who were again forced to retire, but sullenly, contesting every foot of ground.

“That cursed Blackfoot has ruined us, Jim,” groaned Rafe, looking up at the cliffs. “But for him they never could have broken through.”

“The boys fought like devils, I tell ye,” said Jim Diggs. “Oh, I forgot to tell ye thet ‘Old Pegs’ tried to leg it and we had to pop him over.”

“Let him go,” replied Rafe, quietly. “If it had been Dave Farrell I would have felt better, and yet the old man has done me wrong. Look out!”

A great rock hurled from the hand of Whirlwind, struck Jim Diggs on the head and brought him to the earth with a hollow groan, while a wild triumphant yell pealed up from the throat of Whirlwind as he noted the result of the throw. The last and most unscrupulous of the lieutenants of Rafe Norris had gone to his last home. Rafe shook his clenched hand at the Indians on the cliff, and ordered his men to fall back to the mouth of the pass which opened into the Spirit Spring Valley, resolved to hold it to the last.

The Modoc Sioux, greatly thinned by the battles of the last two weeks, sullenly took their stations behind the bowlders, ready to die in their tracks if need be. The whites looked over their cartridges, saw to it that every weapon was in order, and stood ready to obey the commands of their chief.

“I’d like to revenge myself on them, boys,” hissed Rafe Norris. “If it did not look like deserting you, I have a way yet if it would suit you.”

“Let’s hear it, Cap,” said Boston Jake. “We’ll do any thing for you.”

“I don’t doubt it, Jake. Come with me and I’ll tell you my plan.”

The two stood in close conference for a moment and then Jake passed to and fro among the men, telling them what the captain meant to do and they agreed to it at once. Then leaving them to keep off the forces of Dave Farrell as long as possible, Norris stepped hastily to the side of Myrtle.

“Come, my darling,” he said, mockingly. “It is time that we were on the way.”

“I am not going anywhere with you,” was the answer.

“Really, you do yourself wrong by such conduct as this. You _are_ going somewhere with me and at once.”

“I will not.”

“I have no time to waste. Will you go with me quietly or shall I call some of the Indians to carry you? They are not very courteous knights, and perhaps—”

“I will go with you,” she said, quickly, “but woe to you if you cherish any evil thought against me, for with the first weapon I can reach I will kill you.”

He made no answer but took her hand and led her at a rapid pace up the little valley until he reached the south end. Two Indians bearing a number of new lariats accompanied them and they stopped at the base of the almost perpendicular cliff and began to climb like cats until they reached a ledge fifty feet above the bottom of the canon. Then they sent down the ends of a doubled lariat which was formed into a sort of chair at the bottom, and at a sign from Rafe, Myrtle took her place in it and was raised to the ledge above. The rope was lowered again and Rafe came up, hand over hand, and reached the ledge panting for breath. The Indians slid down the lariats, which Rafe flung down to them and the two departed, leaving Rafe and Myrtle standing on the ledge.

“It will trouble your good friends to follow us here,” said Rafe, laughing. “Capital scouts they may be but I doubt if they could track us up this cliff.”

“You will find it hard to deceive my father,” she replied, “if he once takes your trail.”

“I don’t think he will trouble me any more,” replied Rafe, with a grim smile, turning away his head. “Your father was a plucky and keen-witted man, but it is out of his power to harm me now.”

“Have you murdered him?” she gasped, looking at him wildly.

“I am not a murderer,” was the calm answer. “He tried to escape from my men while I was basking in the sunlight of your smiles, and got hit. That is all I know about it.”

“I will remember how it was done,” cried Myrtle, with a lurid gleam in her beautiful eyes. “But I will speak to you no more until the time comes for you to die.”

He took her hand again and led her by wild paths across the mountain, until she was nearly ready to sink from fatigue. Through all this, he had shown a certain chivalrous care of her which was hardly to be looked for after all that had happened. When he saw that she was tired, he stopped and pulled moss from the rocks, which he spread to make her a couch.

“Do not fear me,” he said, as she seemed to shrink from his touch. “I would not do you a wrong, for I worship the ground your feet have trod.”

“It may be so,” she said, quietly. “Let us say that you really love me, then. But, do you not take a strange way of showing it?”

“I will change all that,” he cried. “Look you, Myrtle Forrester—you start at the name, do you?—I will show you that I know more of you than you suppose. On the fourteenth of June, twelve years ago, a train was run into by Sioux on the plain toward the Three Buttes. It was supposed that every person was killed, but as it turned out, an old prairie-man, known as Old Pegs, was some miles from camp, having in charge a child six years of age, the daughter of an Indian agent named Forrester, who was going to Bent’s Fort. These two were all who escaped, and Old Pegs came back to find the camp in ruins, and every man and woman killed and scalped.”

“You know all this? Will you tell me how it came to _your_ knowledge?”

“No matter; I know that it is true, and so do you. Forrester was not quite dead, and after leaving his daughter to the care of Old Pegs, with an injunction to guard her as his life, Forrester died. Old Pegs kept his word, and Myrtle Forrester is now my prisoner, and destined soon to be my wife.”

“You dare not say that my brave guardian did not keep his promise well,” cried Myrtle. “No father could be more tender or true than he has been to me, and I can not bring myself to think that he has been foully murdered.”

“You still cling to that word, Myrtle. If I had been his prisoner, and had attempted to escape, he would not have hesitated to fire at me.”

“Doubtless you are right,” she said; “but I shall not pardon you for that. Why have you told my story to me here?”

“That you may know that I am not entirely unacquainted with your history, and that I knew who and where you were before I came to the Indian country. Myrtle, I came to find you and win your love!”

“You came here for that!” she cried, with dilating eyes, “Who and what are you, then?”

“Rafe Norris, at your service! Curly-headed Ned, so called at the forts upon Hudson Bay; and Edward Forrester within the realms of civilization. But come—have you rested enough?”

She rose at once and followed him, but the name which he had given last troubled her. “Curly-headed Ned” she knew by report, as a chief over one section of the Modoc Sioux, and a man whose name was stained by a hundred crimes. But, why did he lay claim to the name of Forrester?

“I see that you are puzzled,” he said, with a smile. “I am afraid that you doubt that the name of Forrester is really mine. Is it not so?”

“I can not see why you claim it.”

“Because it is my right name. I have the honor to be your cousin, my dear girl, and this will in some sort account for the affection which I bear you.”

“You claim kindred with me, and yet seek to wrong me in the basest manner. There—I believe that it is all false, and— Where are you taking me? I have been in this pass before.”

He smiled in a superior sort of way, and turning a sharp angle, stepped suddenly into the path down which she had forced Velveteens on the day when she made him prisoner. Her captor was taking her to her former home! A great fear came into her heart, for she knew that he would not dare to bring her to the cabin of Old Pegs unless that brave man had ceased to breathe.