THE STORM KING.
On the several signals, the mountaineers saw the Crows spring up even
from coverts where they had not suspected them to lurk. They shook off
the snow like so many feathers off a shot bird, as well as their robes,
which would encumber their onset. Immediately firearms of all sorts,
for the red men are rarely armed uniformly, began and kept up the sharp
continuous crackle of a firing at will.
"Thar she blazes!" said Cherokee Bill, with a ferocious grin.
Besides their bullets, the Crows had flung fireballs and fire tipped
arrows upon the waggons, and had followed them in at the openings of
the interlocked carts. But they had no timid emigrants to deal with,
whatever they might have thought. Quite otherwise, for the Bois Brulés
were on the alert, employing all defensive measures in their full
knowledge available in that site. Their firing was only done when they
pushed the Indians with the muzzles, and it was dead or wounded whom
they thus blew back without the barrier.
This repulse did not dishearten the marauders. They came on again as
boldly, but with more method. Some carried bunches of resinous twigs
smeared with elk fat, and using them first as shields by which to reach
the waggon wheels, dropped them between them and fired them before
retiring. The camp defenders were forced to detach several to put out
these flames, which soon caught the waggon canvas covers.
At one gap about forty of the savages clambered in, and plied knives
and hatchets to reach the horses, which they hoped to stampede, and
so augment the confusion, whilst relieving the owners of the power to
depart speedily. Their whoops were already impressed with the tone of
victory.
The main body of the Red River Half-breeds surrounded a large tent
which undoubtedly contained their valuables, including the captive
women, whose psalms had been heard by the mountain men. The rest of the
Half-breeds resisted the rush towards the cattle.
All at once several Indians were seen setting upon a young Canadian,
who had a keg under one arm, which he defended with a woodman's axe.
"Whisky! Whisky! The firewater; ha, ha!" cried these savages, laughing
and yelling in his face under the very axe which menaced to leave them
no heads into which to gulp their beloved liquor.
"You asses, it's powder!" he returned, contemptuous of their stupidity.
At the same moment, whilst his and half a dozen other pairs of hands
wrenched the keg asunder, one of the gusts of wind swept towards the
group the blazing shreds of a tarpaulin of a waggon being pillaged.
A spark kindled the outpouring grains, the explosion ensued, and the
cluster of redskins was horribly scattered, while the Bois Brulés fell
limbed.
Though almost conquerors, the unsuppressible screams of the victims
of this ravage intimidated the Crows, and nothing but the prompt
encouragement of their chiefs prevented a panic. On the other hand, the
view of so much harm wrought by a single hand revived the Half-breeds'
courage. They saw that, at least, they would not perish without
retaliation, and that they could evade death by torture by blowing
themselves up.
The death dealing explosion acted as a signal for an armed truce of
scanty duration.
Meanwhile the Scotch allies of the mountain men had watched the
struggle from their aerie with the burning impatience of boarhounds who
hear the beast gnashing his tusks. All but Ridge seemed thus chafing to
take a share in the sanguinary game. They only controlled their warlike
instincts till the bursting of the gunpowder keg forced them to applaud
the Canadian victim. Then, without a word, they bounded from among the
rocks and rushed down on the 'Plat.' All that Ridge could do was get
them under some restraint, so as to "plunge in" orderly.
The combatants had their attention so engaged within the camp, that the
new arrivals ran up to the waggon hubs without being noticed. Therefore
the Yager halted them behind two stumps, of which the trunk and limbs
had helped fence the enclosure, and went half round it to inspect the
smoking ruins, where gashed and mutilated bodies proved that neither
Canadian nor Indian struck with daintiness. Rejoining his companions,
he briefly explained how he wished them to aim, and they impatiently
awaited his word of command.
The pause was now over, for Ahnemekee was flourishing his spiked war
club and sounding the charging cry. In another moment the redskins who
survived the last shots of the Bois Brulés would be in the tent of the
women and raining merciless blows on their unresisting forms.
"Fire into the brown of them!" roared Ridge, furious at the scene, not
unknown to him, which he imagined.
At the back of the Crows, then, through the smoke and a few idly
falling flakes of spotless snow, a dozen shots resounded, and at least
ten of them pitched headfirst towards the Canadians, whose balls
whizzed over them and strewed death among their surprised companions.
Taken between two fires, the Crows felt they had lost the day. The
Bois Brulés, without wasting time in seeking whence were their timely
deliverers, shouted "_Vive la Canadienne!_" and bravely took the
offensive. But, casting aside their empty guns, the Crows scattered
through the camp, and tried to scramble out of the environment with
even more alacrity than they had shown in entering. Shot down by the
unknown foe and cut to pieces by the reanimated Half-breeds--it was a
"fix." Weaponless, stripped almost naked for the action, debarred from
speeding to the spot where their garments were stored, the Indians
must have been slaughtered to a man on the frigid waste had not their
frantic appeals to the patron of their tribe seemed to have obtained an
intervention.
That storm which had been two days breeding, and was unmistakably
threatened overnight, flew over the mountain crest and burst on the
tablelands with unmeasured violence. It was the "blizzard," to which
East Indian cyclones, West Indian tornadoes, and what Europe calls
tempests, are zephyrs to fan a baby's brow. One of those cataclysms
which befall poor earth as if destined to destroy it, and rage in the
desert so furiously that the aspect of the whole tract for thousands
upon thousands of miles is often transformed in a few hours. The wind
came out of gorges like a compacted bolt, and basalt was pierced
like putty; the eddies, or "screw wind," uprooted hoary pines and
waltzed away with them in the distance. The snow and hail clouds
were compressed to the tree and hill tops, and condensed the lower
atmosphere so that breathing was difficult, and cattle stopped in
frantic flight as if a colossal hand were laid on their backs. The snow
fell in balled up masses, and light absolutely disappeared so far as
any ability to fix its source existed. All the eye could perceive was a
variation in the density of the seams of gloom. As for hearing, any one
of the portentous sounds must have deafened--the roar of the wind, the
crash of the dethroned peaks, the ripping of the trees, the rush of the
avalanches of snow, sand, and rocks.
The Indians had scattered over the plain, trembling and moaning their
prayers indiscriminately to the Great Good Spirit and the Little Bad
One. On they fled, trampling on birds and beasts, whose lifelong
lairs and nests were wrecked, and which grovelled flat in agony of
apprehension. Most dreadful of all, now and then a fugitive was balled
up in a thick gust, and the packing flakes around him rapidly gathering
additional layers, he was soon thrown down, and thence forth, the core
of a rolling hill spun on for leagues over the tablelands.
Ridge had time to raise the cry, "With me, on our only chance, boys!"
and by a miracle, blindly, yet surely, led the band back to their
late post, however precarious was that refuge, attained over new and
terrible obstacles in the thick snow.
The lately smooth-as-glass beaver meadow lake was rough with stones
that had smashed the mirror; the subterranean stream, vastly swollen,
rose up like an entombed snake, bursting the surface and splashed about
impetuously for outlets which continual changes of the rocky barriers
offered and withdrew. As the torrent rose to the hunters, the snow
massively came down. But they were hardened border men, and far from
letting even justifiable awe paralyse their courage, arched their backs
against the piercing north wind, and listened to judge by its sinister
voice where would open an escape from the enwrapping danger.
Fortunately, the very violence of these Rocky Mountain snowstorms
lessen their duration, and they calm down more rapidly than they break
out--suddenly and without a warning lull. This the adventurers knew,
except Filditch and Ranald alone, perhaps, and though they were knee
deep in icy water and mere snowmen, they dwelt statuesque without a
murmur.
During three hours they huddled up, clinging to each other, merely
shifting, so that every now and then the more exposed should be
replaced by the best sheltered--a living bulwark, that built and
unbuilt itself for its own protection.
"Hurrah, boys!" shouted the Yager, as the wind died away sharply,
"We have weathered it. Old Rocky is some, though, when he pitches
snowballs!"
The snowflakes were soft at last, and not intermingled with icy atoms
that cut the cheek, ay, and even the leather of their dress, like a
sandblast. Soon that ceased, and they could view the dreadful medley of
the devastated country.
All the landmarks were removed, and the new ones were frightfully
fantastic. Trees were stripped into logs, and flung upon the bluffs,
and boulders were perched in the crotches of dismantled trunks. The
grove where the hunters had been ambushed among the stumps, to succour
the Half-breeds' captives, no longer existed even to the roots. No
sound arose where no breathing creature remained. Four feet deep the
snow and sleet spread as a blanched shroud over the level ground.
The survivors waited an hour for the frothy torrent to go down, so that
they could ford it by offering an angular resistance, all supporting
the upstream leader against the still raging current. Then, rigging up
temporary snowshoes out of fragments of elder and their ragged robes,
they began to glide over the fresh floor, hardly firm enough yet to
support even their restless skimming. They were five hours reaching a
place of refuge near the secluded cave which Ridge did not wish to make
of public knowledge.
Of the Crows and the Bois Brulés there was not a trace. Such a storm
could have made one huge snowball of waggons and cattle, and trundled
it irresistibly down the steppes into the gullies of the Bad Lands of
Montana.