drawing the bowie-knives and pistols from their belts. But I steadied my voice and spoke up:

"Boys," said I, very friendly, "what's the use of a pair hitching together who do not like each other, and who will always be uneasy in harness? If I married her, she would be sorry. Come, let us go up to the station and have something to drink. Choose your own refreshments, and don't be backward."

There was a good deal of growling and muttering; but the temptation was irresistible. The result was that in half an hour not a drop of liquor remained to the poor fellow who kept the station—that I paid up the score "like a man," as my drunken companions assured me, who now clapped me familiarly on the shoulder,[120] and called me "Little Grit," as a pet name—that Miss Spitfire, minus her revolver, sat biting her nails about two rods away—and that she waited anxiously for the expected arrival of the 'Frisco train, bound eastward.

[120]

"Come, now, Little Grit," said the leader of the band, when the whisky had all disappeared, "you was gwine with Buffalo Bill; better come along with me—I'm a better fellow, an' hev killed more Injuns than ever Bill did. We're arter them pesky redskins now. A lot of 'em crossed the stream a couple o' nights ago, and stole our best horses. We're bound to hev 'em back. Some o' them red thieves will miss their skalps afore to-morrow night. A feller as kin fight a woman is jist the chap for us. You come along; we'll show you how to tree your first Injun."

The long and the short of it was I had to go. I did not want to. I thought of my mother, of Belle, of Blue-Eyes, and I hung back. But I was taken along. These giants, with their bristling belts, did not understand a person who said "no" to them. And as the secondary effect of the liquor was to make them quarrelsome, I had to pretend that I liked the expedition.

Not to weary the reader, we tracked the marauders, and came across them at earliest dawn the following morning, cooking their dog-stew under the shelter of a high bluff, with the stolen[121] horses picketed near, in a cluster of young cottonwoods.

[121]

I have no talent for depicting skirmishes with the redskins; I leave all that to Buffalo Bill. I will here simply explain that the Indians were surprised, but savage; that the whites were resolved to get back their horses, and that they did get them, and rode off victorious, leaving six dead and nine wounded red warriors on the battle-ground, with 

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