CHAPTER XXVIII.HOW IT WORKED.
If Buffalo Bill had been blessed with the gift of prophecy he could not have given a more accurate forecast of what would happen.
For no more than half an hour had gone by when Tim Benson appeared, creeping out of the bushy covert of the hillside, in company with the gigantic, apelike man, and a score of Ute Indians, with them the chief himself, old Iron Bow.
It was plain that many of the Indians, if not all, were under the influence of liquor—their reeling walk showed it; yet they maintained, in spite of this, their characteristic Indian silence when on dangerous ground, and they proceeded across the open sand to the site of the cache without making much noise.
The two who led the way, though they were painted and feathered like the Indians, it was easy to see were white men. The scout and his pards knew that the small man was Benson; while Bill Betts was equally sure that the apelike figure was Gorilla Jake.
“We’ve got the proof o’ all yer surmises, Cody, right hyer in a nutshell,” Betts whispered. “Benson and Jake has been dopin’ the reds.”
He did not know how accurately the word “dope” described just what had been done.
“I figger thet I could drap that skunk Benson right frum hyer,” said Nomad, fingering his revolver. “But’twouldn’t do. Bersides, we don’t want ter start no killin’; we want ter capter him, so’s he kin git his jest desarts at ther hands o’ ther hangman.”
“And I’d hate to see Gorilla Jake killed,” said Betts, “as it would cut me and Brother Jim out o’ that reward. Still, we might be able to perduce his body, even if he was killed; and the reward is fer him dead er alive.”
It was a characteristic of the Bettses that they kept their eyes on the main chance, and in all their clever border detective work thought more of the offered rewards than anything else. If it was a defect, it was forgiven by their friends, who knew the terrible chances they sometimes took to bring some ruffian to justice. They earned all they got.
“I don’t suppose, Cody,” said the man from Laramie, the old reckless light so often seen in his eyes flaming there once more, “that we could charge that pizen crew and get Benson and the other feller? If you say the word, I’m ready to try it.”
“We might do it!” the scout admitted.
“Wow! Then you’re willing!” and Hickok drew out his revolver.
“But I didn’t say that it would be wise to make the attempt. One or more of us might be killed, and that wouldn’t pay, you know.”
“If we charge with revolvers cracking and every man Jack of us yellin’ to beat the band those reds would run, and I know it.”
Buffalo Bill was not so sure of it that he was willing to take the risk.
“Now we’ll see some fun,” whispered Nomad, as the Utes and their guides came up to the cache which containednothing but whisky bottles filled with creek water. “It’ll be like deprivin’ children of their promised candy. They won’t be willin’ to stand et.”
They saw Benson and the apelike man stop, and Benson point to the ground. The Utes swarmed round the spot, forgetting their caution, and talking, with furious gestures.
“Plenty stung up with excitement, when they thinks they’re goin’ ter git er drink!” Nomad commented.
“They’ll be stung up a heap more when they discover that they ain’t goin’ ter git none,” said Bill Betts. “Woosh! Wouldn’t I jes’ like ter turn my umbreller gun loose on them varmints now.”
He pushed the singular weapon out in front of him.
“I reckon that would be too much like murder,” urged the man from Laramie; “they’re heathen brutes, but still they’re human.”
Benson seemed to be talking to the Utes.
They were too far off to get the words; but they saw Gorilla Jake drop down and begin to scratch away the sand with his huge, clawlike hands. He went into the ground with the rapacity of a scared badger.
The excited Utes stooped over him, getting in his way; and there was a great chattering, showing that they had lost their caution.
Buffalo Bill was beginning to think that an opportunity to charge and capture Benson was being presented, when Gorilla Jake flung out a bottle.
One of the Utes pounced on it; and so great was his eager haste that he did not look at the contents, but broke off the neck of the bottle with a blow of his brown fist and stuck the broken bottle to his mouth.
He gave a choking howl of astonishment and grief when his mouth filled with the luke-warm water; then he held up the bottle, gesticulating furiously.
Gorilla Jake was flinging out more of the bottles, all of which were being seized on. But the yell and the jabbering words of the disappointed Uteneverthelessdrew attention.
The Utes discovered suddenly that the bottles held tepid water instead of whisky. Benson made the same astounding discovery, and so did Gorilla Jake. The thing was at first incomprehensible.
Benson spoke to the apelike man, who delved deeper and flung out more bottles. But these, too, contained only water.
The Indians were yelling in their excitement. They were angry, too, as if they thought that the white men with them had worked the trick. Knives and hatchets flashed in the red rays of the now declining sun.
“A Kilkenny cat fight,” gulped Nomad. “Now’s ther time, Cody, ter wade right inter them.”
Buffalo Bill drew his revolver, and was about to give the command, when a score more of Ute warriors appeared on the scene, coming from the direction of the village. Apparently, having been left behind without a knowledge of what was to be done, they had suspected it, and followed.
“Not now; it would be foolish to charge now!” the scout whispered.
“Waugh!” Nomad growled. “Yer had ought to done et a while ago!”
“That’s what I said,” avowed Bill Betts, fingering his umbrella gun.
He lifted and sighted it. The handle of the umbrella was the gun, the umbrella frame and cloth being mere deceptions.
“Give the word, Cody, and I can sure sting ’em up some, and they won’t know who’s doin’ it.”
But Buffalo Bill did not give the word. Twoscore or more wildly excited Utes too much resembled a hornets’ nest for him to want to poke them up in that way. Buffalo Bill was noted for his courage, but that does not mean that he was noted for recklessness. A good many people mistake the one for the other. Nor was he inhuman.
The Ute recruits were soon yelling quite as much as those who had arrived at the cache with the white men. What was being said could not be made out, but it was apparent that warm remarks were being directed to Benson and Gorilla Jake. Benson could be seen, surrounded by Utes, waving his arms as if trying to explain the thing.
Conditions changed with startling suddenness. Benson’s words seemed to take effect. The Utes swung out from that centre of turmoil, and began to make a search about the deceptive cache in quickly widening circles.
It was plain to the scout and those with him that they would have to get back to avoid trouble. The Indians were in a murderous mood. And to try results with more than forty Utes who were in that ugly mood would be not merely foolhardy, but an invitation to hasty death.
The Utes were rapidly widening their circles, running round and round like hunting dogs that have lost a game trail. Apparently Benson had convinced them that other white men had tampered with the cache, and they werenow furiously resolved to pick up the trail of these interlopers and properly punish them for such an outrage.
Buffalo Bill gave the order to retreat.
“I hates ter go,” Nomad declared.
“No wuss’n I do,” said Betts. “I wouldn’t be keerin’, if only I had Gorilla Jake by the slack o’ the neck, takin’ him along with me.”
Buffalo Bill and the man from Laramie dropped behind to hide the trail; a work which they so thoroughly accomplished that the retreat was effected quickly and safely.
From the top of a tree on a hill some distance off, as the sun was going down, Buffalo Bill saw the Utes streaming back toward their village, the two white men with them. The Utes were howling like drunken maniacs.
Jim Betts set out shortly after dark with the intention of hastening to Blossom Range that he might hurry assistance to Buffalo Bill’s small party. Throughout the whole afternoon the hope had been held that a strong force would appear from the town, to avenge the death of the sheriff and his men, but the help had not come. Jim Betts had been selected because his legs were long and he was a rapid and tireless walker. No horses were to be had, as those of the scout’s party were too far away.
But a wise man makes sudden changes in his plans when there seems reason for so doing.
Hence, instead of striking straight out at his best gait, Jim Betts did not go toward the town at all, after he had proceeded less than half a mile in that direction but turned toward the Ute village.
The reason was that he had seen a shadowy, skulking form moving in that course that he believed to be Gorilla Jake.
Jim Betts, quite as much as his brother Bill, was moved most strongly by considerations touching his pocket; he, too, wanted the reward offered for the arrest of Gorilla Jake. If he could get the ape-man soonest by following him now and pouncing on him it was what he wanted to do. Perhaps he could, he thought, make the capture and take Gorilla Jake right on into the town with him.
The thing was too tempting not to try, and he slipped off through the darkness in hasty pursuit of the skulking figure.
The man he was following was really Gorilla Jake, as Betts made sure when the Ute village was approached. He had not been able to come up with him, nor even see him clearly, until the man passed into the light of a small fire glowing before one of the outer tepees of the village.
Betts hastened his steps, but he was too late; for the apelike man flitted on past the fire.
Jim Betts stopped, his heart hammering against his ribs by reason of his rapid pursuit, while a sense of disappointment and anger went through him.
The Utes were either having a powwow near the centre of the village, or were doing a lot of screeching there just because they liked to howl in their present demoralized condition: but the apelike man had not gone in that direction; and, because he had not, and no one was near the tepee or the fire to observe, the daring fellow, who long before had won the title of the Gamecock because of his recklessness, crossed the line into the Utevillage, still pursuing the murderer of the mine superintendent.
Once again he caught sight of Gorilla Jake, near another lodge, and scudded in that direction, bending his tall form and running with almost silent feet.
“If I kin lay my hands on the dog I’ll choke the wind out o’ him and manage to git him out of hyer, when, if I kin do that much, you bet I kin git him down to Blossom Range. I could land him in the jail thar while I am attendin’ to the other matter, and hold him in it till I got ready to take him to Sody Springs.”
The Indians were still howling.
To his disappointment he saw the apelike figure turn in the direction of those inharmonious sounds.
Betts stopped and listened, called himself softly any number of fools for not getting out of that dangerous place, then went on, still pursuing Gorilla Jake.
There was a fire leaping in front of a lodge, and in and about the lodge he saw many Indian figures; but what they were howling about he could not make out, unless simply noisy because they were drunk. He concluded that the latter must be the explanation.
Then he saw the apelike man, who had been moving toward the Utes, stop beside a lodge, duck his head as if he had heard something, then pass into the tepee.
“Wow!” said Jim Betts, staring. “What’s it mean?”
Anyway, he thought he might be given a chance to dive into that lodge, even though it was almost under the painted noses of the yelling Utes, and grip his intended prisoner. He was too close to the lodge not to try it, reckless as it was.
He was cautious enough to keep the bulk of the lodgebetween himself and the Indians, and to take all the advantage possible from the shadow cast by the leaping fire; he crouched low, too, so that he seemed to slide his tall form along the ground.
In that manner he gained the rear of the lodge, where he was stopped from proceeding farther by hearing Gorilla Jake talking with Tim Benson. At first Betts thought they had company, for he heard Indian grunts, which came, however, from behind the lodge.
The white men were flinging accusations at each other, as soon as Gorilla Jake entered the lodge; it was apparent that Benson had seen him passing and beckoned or called to him to come in.
“You didn’t have as many of them tablets as you said,” Benson declared.
“And you didn’t have any whisky, ’cept what we fust brought in,” Gorilla Jake flung back at him.
“Was that my fault?”
“It wasn’t mine!”
“Some one tampered with the cache. I’m betting it was one of Cody’s crowd.”
“Fer which reason,” said Gorilla Jake, and Jim Betts heard him suck in his breath angrily, “if I’d hed a million o’ them tablets you wouldn’t had the whisky to use with ’em.”
“We might have used them alone. We could have told the Utes that they were better than whisky. That was my plan, when I found the whisky was gone; then I discovered you didn’t have any more. They’ll sober off now, and then——”
“We can cut out o’ this, can’t we?”
“Not while I’m on yer trail,” Jim Betts whispered. “You’re my meat.”
“Cody will follow us!” said Benson.
His tone showed that his courage had broken down, or else he was losing his mental balance.
The apelike man snorted his anger and moved uneasily about the lodge.
“He’ll be comin’ out in a minute,” thought Jim Betts.
In spite of the peril he began to crawl round to the tepee entrance, with the intention of knocking Gorilla Jake on the head there and making a desperate fight to get out of the village with him. He drew his heavy revolver, which he held so that he could use the butt.
Betts had crawled no more than halfway round when the apelike man, appearing in the lodge entrance, drew toward him a mob of furious Utes, who came at him howling.
Betts heard him utter an exclamation and step back; then heard him say to Benson:
“If you’ve got any influence with ’em you’d better use it now. They want me. I reckon, frum the looks; but they’ll be wantin’younext.”
The Indians foamed up to the entrance, then flowed on into the lodge.
A desperate curiosity caused the reckless Gamecock to lift the edge of the lodge skin and peer in, his form flattened out and his face against the earth.
As he did it a blow sounded; and he saw, then, that Gorilla Jake had knocked one of the Indians down, and was backing over against the wall, passing Benson, who sat crouched on a lot of skins.
A growl like that of an aroused animal came from the lips of Gorilla Jake.
“Stand up hyer and help me!” he flung at Benson.
But Benson knew which side his bread was buttered on right then, and he did nothing of the kind. He saw that the Utes had come for Gorilla Jake, and that if he interfered he would put his life in jeopardy. So he sat still, letting the angry Utes stream past and even over him.
“Wow!” breathed the excited Gamecock, an eye at the aperture taking everything in. “Wish’t Brother Bill was hyer ter see this right now. But I’m afeard that this trouble is goin’ to make it mighty hard fer me and Bill to collect that reward fer Gorilla Jake; it begins to look as if he is goin’ to git all that’s comin’ to him. Yet that reward offer said ‘alive or dead.’ If he was scalped, I don’t reckon that would make any difference. Only—I hope they won’t burn him; ’twould be purty hard ter produce the body, in that case.”
The Gamecock was trembling with excitement and apprehension. He wanted to hurl himself in there and take the part of the threatened man, then lead him off to the Blossom Range jail. But, plainly, that would not do. Even Jim Betts was not reckless enough to try that.
“Benson’s a coward, er he’d git right up and into that game,” he breathed. “Gorilla Jake is his friend, ain’t he? Well, why don’t he stand by his friend?”
The Indians were crowding before Gorilla Jake, who was shouting wildly at them. The one he had knocked down was on his feet again, this time with a hatchet in his hand.
“Stand back!” the apelike man howled at them. Hisknife had come out. “Stand back, all o’ ye, er take the consequences. Y’ ain’t goin’ to pull me to pieces, and not git my knife, I tell ye. Thar on the floor is the man you want—not me;he’sthe man that started this thing, by s’jestin’ it. He’s the man that was to furnish the whisky—the coward; and now he sets thar, an’ let’s me do the fightin’. Stand back!”
Few if any of them understood his English, but they understood the significance of the sweep of his long arm as it whirled the knife.
The watching Gamecock did not know what they were yelling, but he judged that they were accusing him of treachery or deceit, or were demanding more whisky, which it was clear he could not furnish. It was plain, too, that they were temporarily crazy. That was the only explanation; and Benson and Gorilla Jake had made them so. No band of maniacs in any lunatic asylum ever looked more terrifying or more desperate.
One of them sprang straight at the throat of Gorilla Jake like a dog flinging at an enemy.
But he never reached the panting man. Gorilla Jake’s long arm swept out, struck him in mid-air with a thump, and the Ute dropped at the feet of the apelike man, his chest torn open by the knife.
“Stand back!” the desperate man yelled, swinging the bloody knife.
He looked insane, too, now; his lips frothing, his great shoulders and muscular arms working, his hairy, painted face twisted in rage, and his gray eyes glittering like an angry animal’s.
The fall of the Ute stayed the braves before him, it had come so suddenly, but only for a moment; thenanother leaped at him, with still others rushing in right behind.
Thump! Thump!
Two of the Utes fell. The third Gorilla Jake caught to his breast, gave him a deadly squeeze, such as a great ape might give, and hurled him lifeless as a missile straight into the faces of his friends, knocking down half a dozen.
Flinging himself backward against the rear wall of the tepee, Gorilla Jake tried to get out there, but found that he could not, and turned to rip the tough, dried skins with his knife.
It gave an opportunity for the maddened Utes to close in on him, and they made use of it.
His swinging arm clove open a hole in the tepee, and he staggered through it, with Utes hanging to him like leeches. Others poured, yelling, through the hole after them.
As this happened, the staring-eyed white man who watched under the edge of the lodge saw Tim Benson rise from the skins he sat on and project himself out of the lodge by the way of the regular exit, brushing aside the Utes crowding in there.
The Gamecock got into action.
But he was bewildered by his desire to follow and capture Benson and his equally strong desire to know what was being done to Gorilla Jake. Already he had reached the conclusion that if he ever received a reward for producing the body of Gorilla Jake, it would be by producing a dead body.
The roaring tumult on the other side of the lodgewhere the apelike man and the maniacal Utes had gone was indescribable.
But Jim Betts was not able to see what became of Gorilla Jake.
He found it necessary to consider his own safety. Utes were all round him. One had actually stepped on the Gamecock’s fingers as he lay sprawled on the ground.
“I got ter git out o’ this!” was his startled thought.
Apparently it was a conclusion taken none too soon.
He began to crawfish away from the lodge, almost flat on the ground, keeping out of the way of the Indians, who rushed in what seemed the probable direction taken by Gorilla Jake.
The Gamecock moved rapidly, now that he had made up his mind.
There was another lodge, into whose shadow he got; then he began to crawl round it, intending to get on the other side, where the darkness lay heaviest, and then perhaps make a dash to get safely out of the village.
“I reckon that Gorilla Jake has gone under,” he was thinking, “and that this climate is gittin’ mighty unhealthy fer Tim Benson. It’ll be also plum malarious fer me if I don’t move out of it. A sudden change of base looks mighty good fer my health right now.”
Then he stopped—not his words only, but his motions.
Right before him he saw a blanketed figure hugging the ground.
“Wow! An Injun! Jest when I was gittin’ shet of ’em!”
The “Injun” discovered by him moved with surprising suddenness.
The blanket lifted, and the man under it jumped at him, clutching the Gamecock by the throat before he could get back or get out a weapon.
Betts was a powerful man, and was never known to surrender readily, so he began to put up the best fight he could. He partly broke the strangle hold on his throat, and reached for his knife, gurgling out a panting exclamation at the same time.
That gurgling exclamation, unintentional though it was, proved a mighty lucky happening for Jim Betts right then. The clutch on his windpipe, which was closing again, dropped away; then a voice sounded:
“Who are you?”
“Wow! Who air you?”
Jim Betts fell back, gasping and gurgling.
“I’m Buffalo Bill!”
“Wow! I’m Jim Betts!”
The man drew himself together, pulling the blanket over him.
“I beg your pardon,” he whispered: “I thought you were an Indian.”
“An’ I thought you must be the devil the way you got holt o’ me.”
“Get under this blanket quick, and lie low. Some of the Utes are coming over this way.”
Betts, helped by the scout, slid under the gray covering, so that, as both men lay flat, the blanket covering them looked like a dark shadow against the ground.
“Wow!” Betts was breathing, filled with amazement. “Cody! Wow! Buffalo Bill! I wonder if my thinkin’ machinery ain’t slipped its gearin’? Cody can’t be here.”
“What’s happening?” the scout asked in a whisper, lowering his head.
He had been peering out, with the blanket drawn close about his eyes.
“I reckon that Gorilla Jake has gone under.”
“I was guessing as much.”
“You seen him?”
“I heard him.”
“And the Utes!”
“No one could help hearing them.”
“You didn’t see Matt Shepard, the sheriff?”
“I didn’t; reckon he has gone under,” said Betts. “What you doin’ in hyer, anyhow?”
“And you? We supposed you were on your way to Blossom Range.”
Betts began an explanation, but the scout cut him short.
“Hist! Not now. The Utes are near, some of them!”
Betts and the scout lay snugly under the blanket, and the running Utes passed on and away.
Buffalo Bill began to talk again in cautious whispers.
“I came in here to look round, thinking that perhaps I might be able to capture Benson.”
“And I come in hyer to look round, thinkin’ maybe I might be able to capture Gorilla Jake.”
“But why didn’t you go on to Blossom Range?”
“That’s why. I wanted to capture Jake. I seen him outside of the village when I fust set out, and turned in hyer after him. I might have got him, but the Utes chipped in, and I reckon Jake has seen his finish.”
“You saw Benson?”
“Yes. He was in the lodge with Jake, but he cut andrun when the Utes pounced on Jake, so I don’t know what become of him.”
“I think we’d better try to get out of this.”
“It’s dangerous hyer right now.”
“Almost as dangerous as death itself. If the Utes find us we’re gone. I never saw Indians so crazy. I’ve seen them drunk, but never anything like this. If Gorilla Jake has been killed by them I guess he brought it on himself, for he and Benson must have fired them up with whisky.”
“Old forty-rod, if it’s filled with drugs and dope to make it go fur, will knock out a white man, and make a lunatic of a red; I’ve seen it before.”
“I never saw Indians as wild as these are to-night.”
“I couldn’t understand anything the Utes said, but I jedge they was crazy mad because Jake and Benson couldn’t furnish ’em no more old redeye. Deprive a red of whisky, after he’s been havin’ some, and it turns him into a wild man. Benson and Jake was shore playin’ with fire, and they’d ought to have knowed it. I reckon it finished Jake.”
“We’ll crawl off in this direction, in the shadow of the lodge; be sure to keep the blanket over you,” said the scout. “Be careful, too, that you move slowly and cautiously. I shouldn’t have risked my life in here if I had fully understood the situation. I’m glad I met you.”
Jim Betts coughed out a low, wheezing laugh.
“My achin’ throat don’t echo that sentiment,” he said; “it’d feel a heap easier if I hadn’t met you. I never met up with a man had a grip like that; I thought my neck was bein’ crushed in.”
The scout did not echo the laugh; at this distance the thing looked too serious.
“I might have killed you, Betts,” he said. “I saw you getting that knife, and——”
“Then I ripped out somethin’ in purty plain English, and you tumbled. It’s all right now. But I reckon my throat will ache fer a week. When I have a heap of time I’m goin’ ter see if you can’t choke an iron bolt so that it will holler.”
They crept along under the blanket, slipping it over the ground, until they had cautiously crossed an open space; then found themselves within the shadow of another lodge.
They were moving away from the centre of disturbance and apparently increasing their chances.
“Whar did ye leave the rest o’ the boys?” Betts asked, as they stood up in the shadow of this lodge.
“Where they were when you left us.”
“They knowed you had come?”
“Yes.”
“Brother Bill would be surprised, I reckon, if he knowed I was here. He says I allus take too big risks. Shall we make a run fer the aidge o’ the village now? The distance ain’t more’n a hundred feet. Thar’s a heap o’ noise goin’ on, and I reckon we could make a lot of racket without bein’ heard by the crazy Utes.”
“I think your brother Bill is right in saying that you are inclined to take unnecessary risks. If we make a dash to get out of here we may be seen and might be shot. Caution still stands us in hand, I think.”
The scout stooped again, and, clinging to the shadowof the lodge as long as he could, he worked his way toward the outer circle of lodges.
Jim Betts followed him.
Fortunately, interest in another quarter kept them from being seen.