Page:B M Bower - Heritage of the Sioux.djvu/281

IN THE DEVIL'S FRYING-PAN that grove themselves, and out in the open, there was not one chance in a hundred that they could do it.

From the outside in to where they were entrenched was just a trifle easier. The Indians in the grove were all absorbed in watching the edge of the Frying-pan and had their backs to the open, never thinking that white men would be coming that way; for had not the other party been decoyed around the farther end of the big butte, and did not several miles and a barbed-wire fence lie between?

So when Applehead and his three, coming in from the north, approached the grove, they did it under cover of a draw that hid them from sight. From the shots that were fired, Applehead guessed the truth; that Luck's bunch had sensed danger before they had actually ridden into the Frying-pan itself, and that the Navajos were trying to drive them out of the rocks, and were not making much of a success of it.

"Now," Applehead instructed the three when they were as close as they could get to the grove without being seen, "I calc'late about the best thing 269