At sunset of that day the emigrants, now half mad of thirst, and half ready to despair of succor or success, heard the Indian drums sound and the shrilling of the eagle-bone whistles.  The Crows were chanting again.  Whoops arose along the river bank.

“My God! they’re coming!” called out a voice.

There was a stir of uneasiness along the line, an ominous thing.  And then the savage hosts broke from their cover, more than a thousand men, ready to take some loss in their hope that the whites were now more helpless.  In other circumstances it must have been a stirring spectacle for any who had seen it.  To these, cowering in the sand, it brought terror.

But before the three ranks of the Crows had cleared the cover the last line began to yell, to whip, to break away.  Scattering but continuous rifle fire followed them, war cries arose, not from savages, but white men.  A line of riders emerged, coming straight through to the second rank of the Crow advance.  Then the beleaguered knew that the Missourians were up.

“Banion, by God!” said a voice which few stopped to recognize as Woodhull’s.

He held his fire, his rifle resting so long through the wagon wheel that Caleb Price in one swift motion caught it away from him.

“No harm, friend,” said he, “but you’ll not need this just now!”

His cold eye looked straight into that of the intending murderer.

The men in the wagon park rose to their work again.  The hidden Bannacks began to break away from their lodgment under the river bank.  The sound of hoofs and of shouts came down the trail.  The other wing of the Missourians flung off and cleared the ford before they undertook to cross, their slow, irregular, deadly rifle fire doing its work among the hidden Bannacks until they broke and ran for their horses in the cottonwoods below.  This brought them partly into view, and the rifles of the emigrants on that side bore on them till they broke in sheer terror and fled in a scattered sauve qui peut.

The Crows swerved under the enfilading fire of the men who now crossed the ford.  Caught between three fires, and meeting for their first time the use of the revolver, then new to them, they lost heart and once more left their dead, breaking away into a mad flight west and north which did not end till they had forded the upper tributaries of the Green and Snake, and found their way back west of the Tetons to their own country far east and north of the Two-go-tee crossing of the Wind River Mountains; whence for many a year they did not emerge again to battle with the white nation on the Medicine Road.  At one time there were forty Crow squaws, young and old, with gashed breasts and self-amputated fingers, given in mourning over the unreturning brave.

What many men had not been able to do of their own resources, less than a fourth their number now had done.  Side by side Banion, Jackson, a half dozen others, rode up to the wagon gap, now opened.  They were met by a surge of the rescued.  Women, girls threw themselves upon them, kissing them, embracing them hysterically.  Where had been gloom, now was rejoicing, laughter, tears.