Page:B M Bower - Heritage of the Sioux.djvu/222

THE HERITAGE OF THE SIOUX camp he had his ideas fixed and his plans all perfected. He told Luck that somebody was working down the draw in the dark, and that it looked like a Navvy trick; and that they had better be ready for them, because they weren't coming just to pass the time of day—"now I'm tellin' ye!"

The nerves of the Happy Family were raw enough by now to welcome anything that promised action; even an Indian fight would not be so much a disaster as a novel way of breaking the monotony. Applehead, with the experience gathered in the old days when he was a young fellow with a freighting outfit and old Geronimo was terrorizing all this country, sent them back in compact half circle just within the shelter of the trees and several rods away from their campfire and the waterhole. There, lying crouched behind their saddles with their rifles across the seat-sides and with ammunition belts full of cartridges, they waited for whatever might be coming in the dark.

"It's horses," Pink exclaimed under his breath, as faint sounds came down the draw. "Maybe—"

"Horses—and an Injun laying along the back of every one, most likely," Applehead returned 210