“A knife—­quick!  Cut it off above the feather!”

He himself caught the front of the shaft and pushed it back, close to the head.  By chance she saw Jed’s knife at his belt as he kneeled, and drew it.  Clumsily but steadily she slashed into the shaft, weakened it, broke it, pushed the point forward.  Jackson himself unhesitatingly pulled it through, a gush of blood following on either side the shoulder.  There was no time to notice that.  Crippled as he was, the man only looked for weapons.  A pistol lay on the ground and he caught it up.

But for the packs and bales that had been thrown against the wheels, the inmates of the corral would all have fallen under the rain of arrows that now slatted and thudded in.  But they kept low, and the Indians were so close against the wagons that they could not see under the bodies or through the wheels.  The chocks had not yet been taken out from under the boxes, so that they stood high.  Against such a barricade cavalry was helpless.  There was no warrior who wanted to follow Jackson’s example of getting inside.

For an instant there came no order to fire.  The men were reaching into the wagons to unsling their rifles from the riding loops fastened to the bows.  It all was a trample and a tumult and a whirl of dust under thudding hoofs outside and in, a phase which could last no more than an instant.  Came the thin crack of a squirrel rifle from the far corner of the wagon park.  The Crow partisan sat his horse just a moment, the expression on his face frozen there, his mouth slowly closing.  Then he slid off his horse close to the gap, now; piled high with goods and gear.

A boy’s high quaver rose.

“You can’t say nothing this time!  You didn’t shoot at all now!”

An emigrant boy was jeering at his father.

But by that time no one knew or cared who shot.  The fight was on.  Every rifle was emptied in the next instant, and at that range almost every shot was fatal or disabling.  In sudden panic at the powder flare in their faces, the Crows broke and scattered, with no time to drag away their wounded.

The fight, or this phase of it, was over almost before it was begun.  It all was one more repetition of border history.  Almost never did the Indians make a successful attack on a trading post, rarely on an emigrant train in full corral.  The cunning of the Crow partisan in driving in a prisoner as a fence had brought him close, yes—­too close.  But the line was not yet broken.

Firing with a steady aim, the emigrants added to the toll they took.  The Crows bent low and flogged their horses.  Only in the distant willow thickets did they pause.  They even left their dead.

There were no wounded, or not for long.  Jackson, the pistol in his hand, his face gray with rage and pain, stepped outside the corral.  The Crow chief, shot through the chest, turned over, looked up dully.

“How, cola!” said his late prisoner, baring his teeth.