The Mountain Divide - Frank H. Spearman (english reading book .txt) 📗

the whole transcontinental line confronted the engineers right where they were now riding. Here the mountains were thrown abruptly above the plain to a great height and the locating engineers were still at their wits’ ends to know how to climb 58 the tremendous ascent with practicable grades. Stanley became so interested in studying the country during the day, as the difficulties of the problem presented themselves afresh to him, that the party made slow progress. Camp was pitched early in the afternoon under a ridge that offered some natural features for defence. Here the cavalrymen were left, and Stanley, taking Scott, started out after some venison for supper. Bucks stood by, looking eager as the two made ready for the hunt.

“Come along if you like,” said Stanley at length. “You won’t be happy, Bucks, till you get lost somewhere in this country.”

Sublette lent Bucks a rifle, and the three men set out together, riding rapidly into the rough hills to the northwest. Scott covered the ground fast, but he searched in vain for sign of antelope. “Indians have been all over this divide,” he announced after much hard riding and a failure to find any game. “It doesn’t look like venison for supper to-night, colonel. Stop!” he added suddenly.

His companions, surprised by the tone of the 59 last word, halted. Leaning over his pony’s neck the scout was reading the rocky soil. He dismounted, and walking on, leading his horse, he inspected, very carefully, the ground toward a dry creek bed opening to the east.

He was gone perhaps five minutes. “Colonel,” he said, smiling reassuringly, when he returned, “this is no place for us.”

“Indians,” said Stanley tersely.

“Cheyennes. Back to camp.”

“Down the creek?” suggested Stanley.

“The bottom is alive with Indians.”

“Up then, Bob?”

“Their camp is just above the bend. They have spotted our trail, too, somehow. It may be they are riding easy to close in on us,” smiled Scott, while Bucks’s hair began to pull. “Our way out is over this divide.” He indicated the rough country east of the creek as he spoke.

“Divide!” exclaimed Stanley, looking up at the practically sheer walls of rock that hedged the course of the creek. “We can’t climb those hills, if we never get out.”

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“They’re not quite so bad as they look. Anyway, colonel, we’ve got to.”

“They can pick us off our horses like monkeys all the way up!”

“It’s a chance for our scalps, colonel. And it will be as hard riding for them as it is for us.”

Stanley looked at Bucks with perplexity. “This boy!”

“I can make it, Colonel Stanley,” exclaimed Bucks, who felt he must say something.

Stanley still hesitated.

“We’ve no time to lose,” smiled Scott significantly.

“Then go ahead, Bob.”

They had half a mile of comparatively level ground to cross before they began their climb, and this strip they rode very hard. When they reached the hills, Scott headed for a forbidding-looking canyon and urged his horse without ceasing through the rocky wash that strewed its floor. Stanley, with an excellent mount, could have kept well up, but he had put Bucks ahead of him in the safe place of the little procession, and the boy 61 had difficulty in keeping within call of their active leader. The minute they were out of sight of the creek bottoms, Scott, choosing an apparently unscalable ascent, urged his horse up one of the canyon walls and the three were soon climbing in order.

Happily, Bucks’s scrub horse gave a better account of himself in climbing than he had done in covering better ground. As their horses stumbled hurriedly along the narrow ledges, they made noise enough to wake the Indian dead and the loose rock tumbled with sinister echoes down the canyon wall. But progress was made, and the white men felt only anxious lest pursuit should catch them exposed on the uncovered height up which they were fast clambering.

Secure in their escape, the three were nearing the coveted top when a yell echoed through the canyon from below. There was no mistaking such a yell. Bucks, who had never heard anything so ferocious, had no need to be told what it was––it, so to say, introduced itself. And it was answered by another yell, more formidable still, and 62 again by a chorus of yells. Then it seemed to Bucks’s unaccustomed ears as if a thousand lusty throats were opened, and scared rigid he looked behind him and saw the canyon below alive with warriors.

They were riding helter-skelter to reach a range where they could pick the fugitives off the crest of the canyon side. Within a minute, almost, their rifles were cracking. Scott had already reached a point of concealment, and above the heads of Bucks and Stanley fired his rifle in answer. An Indian brave, riding furiously to a rock that would have commanded Stanley and Bucks as they urged their horses on, started in his saddle as Scott fired and clutched his side instantly with his rifle hand. His pony bolted as the half-hitch of the rawhide thong on its lower jaw was loosened and the rider, toppling, fell heavily backward to the ground. The riderless horse dashed on. The yelling Indians had had their blunt warning and now scurried for cover. The interval, short as it was, gave Bucks and Stanley a chance.

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Spurring relentlessly and crouching low on their horses’ necks, they made a dash across the exposed wall of rock near the top, that lay between them and safety. A renewed yell echoed the rage and chagrin of their pursuers, and a quick fire of scattering shots followed their rapid flight, but the Indians were confused, and Bucks, followed by his soldier champion, flung himself from his saddle in the clump of cedars behind which Scott, safely hidden, was reloading his rifle. Choosing his opportunity carefully, Stanley fired at once at an exposed brave and succeeded in disabling him. Bucks was forbidden to shoot and told to hold his rifle, if it were needed, in readiness for his companions. With the bullets cutting the twigs above their heads, Stanley and Scott held a council of war. Scott insisted on remaining behind to check their pursuers where they were, while the two with him rode on to safety.

“I can hold this bunch, colonel,” declared Scott briefly. “There may not be a second chance as good. Get on with the boy before another party cuts you off. They can cross below us and save two or three miles. Get away.”

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“But how will you get away?” demanded Bucks.

Stanley laughed. “Never mind Bob. He could crawl through a Cheyenne village with a camp-fire on his back. It’s what to do with you, Bucks, that bothers us.”

“Just you get on, colonel,” urged Bob. “I’ll manage all right. Leave your horse,” he added, turning to Bucks, “and you take mine.”

Bucks protested and refused to leave Scott with an inferior mount, but his protests were of no avail. He was curtly directed by Stanley to do as he was told, and unwillingly he turned his horse over to Scott and took the scout’s better steed. Scott added hurried and explicit directions to Stanley as to the course to follow back to camp, and without loss of time Stanley and Bucks crouching behind friendly rocks led their horses up the inner canyon wall and, remounting at the top, galloped hurriedly down a long ridge.

At intervals, shots from the Indians reached their ears, and long-drawn yells, followed by the sharper crack of Scott’s rifle, echoed from the west as the scout held the wall against the enemy. Bucks did not understand the real danger that 65 the scout feared for his party. It was that other parties of the marauding Cheyennes might, by following the creek, gain the divide in time to cut off the railroad men from their line of escape. The sounds of the stubborn contest behind them died away as their straining horses gradually put miles between them and the enemy. The fugitives had reached the summit of the hills and with a feeling of safety were easing their pace when Bucks discerned, almost directly ahead of them, dark objects moving slowly along the foot of a wooded hill. The two men halted.