Fugitives' Fire

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It was a small band of buffalo, an offscouring or little side eddy from one of the black masses of millions that moved across the plains, and, when Rushing Wind came on their traces, his heart leaped with the lust for fresh meat. Parched corn and dried buffalo flesh, tasteless as dry chips of wood, had been his diet for days during a lonely excursion upon the prairie. He had gone out from the Cheyenne village like some knight of the olden days, riding aimlessly, praying for adventure, hoping greedily for scalps and for coups to be counted. But no good fortune had come his way. For ten days, patient as a hungry wolf, he had dogged the way of a caravan of white men, pushing west and west, but he had had no luck. In the night they guarded their circle of wagons with the most scrupulous care. In the day, their hunting parties were never less than three well-armed men. And though their plains craft might not be of a very high order, it was an old maxim among the Cheyennes that all white men shoot straight with a rifle. The Indians were apt to attribute it to bigger medicine. As a matter of fact, it was simply that the whites had infinitely more powder and ball to use in practice. The red man had to get his practice out of actual hunting or battle. Accordingly Rushing Wind had at last turned off from the way of the caravan and struck at a tangent from its line across the prairie, and now he had come upon the trail of the buffalo.

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