Page:Lost with Lieutenant Pike (1919).djvu/104

 and laughed like brothers; Scar Head and Baroney cantered together, behind them.

"Our scalps were loose, back there," uttered Baroney.

"Yes," said Scar Head. "I smelled blood."

"You are no Pawnee. They would scalp you, too. Were you afraid?"

"No. No one is afraid, with Chief Pike."

Baroney laughed. He was a small, dark, black-bearded man who spoke about as much Pawnee as Scar Head spoke French, but was good at the sign language; so by using all three means, with now and then a word of Spanish, he got along.

They had ridden about a mile, and were slowly overtaking the American column, when another band of figures came charging. The medicine-man sighted them, the first, for he pointed—and they indeed looked, at a distance, to be more Indians, issuing from ambush in a river bottom on the left and launching themselves to cut off the Chief Pike squad.

Scar Head himself read them with one keen stare.

"Elk," he grunted, in Pawnee, and stiffened with the hunt feeling.

Baroney called, excitedly; but Chief Pike had read, too. He shouted, turned his horse and shook his reins and flourished his gun, and away he dashed, to meet the elk. In a flash Scar Head clapped his