In the Heart of the Rockies eBook

“‘My white brother is weak with the pain,’ the chief said quietly; ’he is talking foolishly.  He knows that Leaping Horse will stay with his friend.  He will go and look for a place.’  Without listening to what I had to say he took up his rifle and went up the valley, which was a steep one.  He was away better than half an hour and then came back.  ‘Leaping Horse found a place,’ he said, ’where he and his brother can make a good fight.  Straight Harry get on his friend’s back.’  It was clear that there weren’t no use talking to him.  He lifted me up on to my feet, then he got me well up on to his back, as if I had been a sack of coal, and went off with me, striding along pretty near as quick as if I had not been there.  It might have been half a mile, when he turned up a narrow ravine that was little more than a cleft in the rock that rose almost straight up from the valley.  It did not go in very far, for there had been a slide, and it was blocked up by a pile of rocks and earth, forty or fifty feet high.  It was a big job even for the chief to get me up to the top of them.  The snow had drifted down thick into the ravine, and it was a nasty place to climb even for a man who had got nothing but his rifle on his shoulder.  However, he got me up safely, and laid me down just over the crest.  He had put my buffalo robe over my shoulders before starting, and he rolled me up in this and said, ’Leaping Horse will go and fetch rifles and bear-meat,’ and he set straight off and left me there by myself.”

CHAPTER IX

A BAD TIME

“Even to me,” Harry went on, after refilling and lighting his pipe, “it did not seem long before the chief was back.  He brought a heavy load, for besides the rifles and bear’s flesh he carried on his back a big faggot of brushwood.  After laying that down he searched among the rocks, and presently set to work to dig out the snow and earth between two big blocks, and was not long before he scooped out with his tomahawk a hole big enough for the two of us to lie in comfortably.  He laid the bear’s-skin down in this, then he carried me to it and helped me in and then put the robes over me; and a snugger place you would not want to lie in.

“It was about ten feet below the level of the crest of the heap of rocks, and of course on the upper side, so that directly the red-skins made their appearance he could help me up to the top.  That the two of us could keep the Utes back I did not doubt; we had our rifles, and the chief carried a revolver as well as I did.  After they had once caught a glimpse of the sort of place we were on, I did not think they would venture into the ravine, for they would have lost a dozen men before they got to the mound.  I had looked round while the chief was away, and I saw that a hundred yards or so higher up, the ravine came to an end, the sides closing in, so there was no fear of our being attacked from there.  What I was afraid of was that the Indians might be able to get up above and shoot down on us, though whether they could or not depended on the nature of the ground above, and of course I could not see beyond the edge of the rocks.