THREE SCOUTS
Let me now return and follow the fortunes of the three scouts, Cowan,
Loasby and Quinn, who left Fort Pitt shortly before Big Bear and his
men appeared on the hill behind it the morning of April 14th.
The trail from Fort Pitt to Frog Lake is a fairly good one in summer,
but the scouts did not follow it. They went out along the river, which
runs a few miles to the south. They travelled slowly, reconnoitring the
ground ahead from commanding rises, and not until sunrise next morning
were they looking through their glasses from the wooded slopes across
the chain of lakes at the site of the Frog Lake settlement and the two
hundred lodges a short way beyond.
They observed a number of things. First, that where the settlement
had been there was no longer anything but a collection of charred and
deserted ruins. Again, that the camp was still where Quinn had last
seen it; at least the lodges. The most important thing of all they also
noted, but unfortunately its significance did not then strike them.
This was the fact that very little life was observable about the camp.
Why, the little scouting detail was to discover later to its cost.
When Corporal Cowan and his companions left Frog Lake on their return
to Pitt—I give the story as Quinn told it to me—they again avoided
the trail. The Indian camp was behind them, true, but there might be
hostile parties prowling about the country and the white men had no
desire to run into a band that would likely greatly outnumber them. As
they drew near Fort Pitt, however, without having sighted an enemy,
they put aside a caution they now considered unnecessary and struck
over to the trail. Quinn always maintained this was contrary to his
advice, but Cowan was in command.
They had not followed it far until they saw that the trail was marked
with many hoof-prints. Quinn dismounted and examined it closely.
“I’m right, Cowan!” he exclaimed, looking up. “I said the Indians were
ahead of us. Well, they are. They’ve come down the trail as we went out
along the river. Here’s the track of a shod horse—my uncle’s mare that
Wandering Spirit took the day of the massacre. I put those shoes on
myself. I know them.”
Cowan disagreed. “The police have been out during the day, rounding up
the stock. That accounts for the tracks. The whole camp was at Frog
Lake still, wasn’t it?”
“The camp, yes—the lodges, but remember we saw mighty few Indians,”
Quinn returned.
“Well, I’m not scared,” said Cowan. “We’re going on, anyhow. Funk,
that’s what’s wrong with you, Quinn.”
To which Quinn retorted angrily that he could go anywhere Cowan dared.
They rode on in silence.
But as it happened, Quinn was right, Cowan wrong.
Fort Pitt was now little more than a mile away and just over the
crest of the slope behind it, out of sight of the fort, four hundred
blood-drunken and painted savages were discussing energetically plans
for getting the police outside the walls of the fort so that they might
shoot them down with no risk to themselves.
The camp lay just to the left of the trail. Behind it a fringe of
willows marked the course of a creek, and a break in this fringe at one
point showed where the trail crossed the creek over a bridge.
When the three scouts looked from the bridge through the opening and
saw the hostile camp ahead and to their left, they realized that they
had made a mistake in quitting the river for the trail. But it was now
too late to rectify it. Putting spurs to their horses, they dashed for
the top of the slope.
The Indians saw them. Grabbing their guns, with wild cries of
“_Chemoginusuk! Chemoginusuk!_ (_Soldiers! Soldiers!_)” they rushed for
the trail to head them off.
Along its crest to the right of the trail, the slope was thickly
wooded, shutting off any chance of getting through to the fort in that
direction. They had no option but to stick to the trail.
It has been said that a man does not die until his time comes, and the
tragedy of that wild ride through the Indian camp rests in the fact
that the three men had come unscathed through that hail of lead and
then, with safety just ahead, Cowan’s horse, crazed no doubt by the
excitement, stopped suddenly and—bucked!
In vain Cowan spurred him—he would not budge. Cowan dropped to the
ground and ran. An Indian, his gun levelled on the policeman, raced
alongside. Cowan put out a hand.
“Don’t shoot, my brother!” he said in Cree, and the redskin turned and
left him.
But a puff of smoke came from the wood on the right and, with a bullet
through his heart, poor Cowan pitched his length along the dusty trail.
Henry Quinn’s escape down the hill by way of the trail had been cut
off, and answering the fusillade of which he was the target with
repeated shots from his own rifle—fortunately for himself later without
doing any damage—he swung at top speed off to the right along the
wooded slope and disappeared among the poplar bluffs up the river. The
hostiles were too intent upon the capture of Fort Pitt to go after him.
Meanwhile Loasby was pounding down the slope in full view of the fort
and safety as fast as his jaded mount would bear him. Lone Man—cool,
crafty, daring, a human hawk whose clear brain never permitted his
nerve or confidence to desert him—with flapping pinion of soiled white
blanket, on the white racer that had unaccountably disappeared from
his owner’s stable one dark night a year before in Montana, followed
swiftly after him.
A shot. The saddle seemed suddenly to have grown hot under Loasby.
Blood trickled down his leg, but he rode on. Another shot. His horse
stopped, swayed, a bullet in his neck.
Lone Man was close behind—too close. The chest of the white racer hit
like a hammer on the rump of the policeman’s stricken mount and down
they went, over and over, the dying animal and the living, falcon
redskin and wounded trooper.
Loasby was first on his feet. Half stunned, he did not stop to look
round but ran.
Lone Man raised himself on one knee and at the crack of his rifle,
Loasby tumbled with his face in the dust and the trail of a bullet
through his body close to the spine.
And now the burst of fire which, since Loasby was apparently past the
possibility of injury from it, there was no longer need to hold, came
at the intrepid savage from the fort. But he writhed forward, on his
belly like a snake, till he reached the policeman. He turned him over.
“I thought he was dead,” Lone Man told me later, “or I would have
finished him. But he ought to have killed me—he was first up.”
Drawing his knife, he cut the belt, with its cartridges and revolver,
circling Loasby’s waist. Then he writhed back with it, gripping the
grass with his crimsoned fingers, to his horse and galloped away up the
slope. And all the while the bullets from the fort plugged viciously
into the sod around him.
Loasby got on his feet again. He staggered to the gate in the fort,
flung out derisive fingers in the direction of Lone Man and collapsed
in the arms of the two men come to meet him. They carried him into the
fort.
Henry Quinn halted in a grove of poplars a mile up the river from the
fort, dismounted and tied his horse to a tree. Night fell, and under
cover of the river-bank he crept cautiously down to the road leading
from the fort to the stream. He could not approach the stockade in the
darkness; the sentries would be nervous. Or a prowling redskin might
write _finis_ for him.
He drew his knife and dug and dug in the clay bank. The cold gripped
him; he shook violently. He must have shelter from the blinding
storm! At length he had a hole, big enough to shield his body from
the swirling snow, the ferocious wind. He crawled in. If only he had
something—a crust, even! He was ravenous.
The hours dragged. At dawn he stood outside the stockade, calling for
Sergeant Martin.
The curling black head of Wandering Spirit appeared suddenly at an
upper window of one of the buildings. Fort Pitt was in the hands of the
Indians!
Again there was a cry of “_Chemoginusuk!_” and a moment later Wandering
Spirit was following a fresh footprint through the newly-fallen snow.
It led to the river; there ended abruptly. The war chief stood on the
bank, studying the mystery of the vanishing track. Where could he have
gone, this policeman? The riddle was unsolvable, and presently he
walked on along the bank, rifle in hand, searching every angle of the
surroundings with his hawk-like eyes.
Another Indian—Isadore Mondion—followed the footprint from the fort to
the river and stopped. Just beneath him a pair of legs stuck out of the
bank. With one hand he motioned to the war chief; with the other he
pointed downward. Wandering Spirit started toward him, running.
“Henry,” said Mondion, “come out.”
The poor scout, hiding like an ostrich, trembled but he did not move.
“Come out!” Mondion repeated sternly. “Quick, before Wandering Spirit
comes! I will protect you.”
Quinn crawled from his hole. The war chief, his rifle held
threateningly before him hurried up. Mondion put a hand on Quinn; he
stepped in front of him.
“My prisoner, Kahpaypamahchakwayo!” he said, meeting the war chief’s
lowering glance with one equally truculent. “_Payatik!_ Be careful! His
life is mine—I give it to him. From to-day we are brothers, Henry and
I.”
The war chief’s answer, Quinn thought, would never come. But at length,
with a wave of his hand, “So be it, _neestas_,” he replied. “But the
life you give him—if he loves it, he will know better than to work
against us! He was with the police. And his rifle—that must be mine.”
The rifle was surrendered and Mondion, his arm about his adopted
brother, walked with him into the fort.
The warriors crowded round Quinn.
“His medicine is strong!” they cried. “_Mistahay muskowow!_ Bullets
will not pierce him—three times he has escaped!”
“_How! How!_” shouted the camp. And Quinn was safe.