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The encampment was on the prairie near a fringe of timber and the coulie on one side and an elevation of about ten feet on the other. It was a beautiful but very unfortunate location for the command to camp, and would probably not have been selected had it been known that they were surrounded by 400 or 500 hostile warriors. Maj. Brown had about one hundred and fifty men under his command.
In a minute they were at the head of the slope and the girl could see down into the coulie, where low mesquite shrubs masked the bottom and the little spring that bubbled there. Something was going on down in the coulie. The bushes waved; something rose and fell in their midst like a flail. There was a voice other than that of the raucous tones of the lion, and which squalled almost as loudly!
She rose somewhat precipitately and went over and stood by the window. Faint and eerie from the muffling mazes of some far-off coulie came again the wolf cry. She turned shudderingly away. "It sounds like the wail of a lost soul!" "Calling to another affinitive soul, neither of them knowing or caring, in the all-compensative ecstasy of their own making, that they have lost anything at all!
Then it began to move slowly towards a patch of ash and wild plums in the head of a coulie, some distance off. Its pursuer rode after it, and when close enough would push by it and fire, while the bear would spin quickly round and charge as fiercely as ever, though evidently beginning to grow weak.
At least, she felt a great many years older now than she did that day so short a time before when, riding along the trail, she had heard Pratt and the mountain lion fighting in Brother's Coulie. She looked at her reflection in the long dressing-mirror in her own room, and could not see that she had added to her stature in this time "one jot or tittle." But inside she felt worlds older.
Like most cowboys, they carried 44-calibre Colt revolvers, and were accustomed to and fairly expert in their use, and they were mounted on ordinary cow-ponies quick, wiry, plucky little beasts. In one case the bear was seen from quite a distance, lounging across a broad table-land. The cowboy, by taking advantage of a winding and rather shallow coulie, got quite close to him.
Paul organizations and most all of their members were St. Paul boys. They never had had an opportunity to drill and most of them were not familiar with the use of firearms. After marching for two days, during which time they interred a large number of victims of the savage Sioux, they went into camp at Birch Coulie, about fifteen miles from Fort Ridgely.
The cavalcade was ambling along toward the branding pen, which was in the bottom of a coulie. As Frances rode up behind the party, Molly's little feet making so little sound that her presence was unnoticed, the Western girl heard a rather shrill voice ask: "And what are they doing it for, Pratt? I re'lly don't just understand, you know. Why burn the mark upon the hides of those er embryo cows?"
He then scrambled out of the coulie, put spurs to his pony, and raced up to within fifty yards of the astonished bear ere the latter quite understood what it was that was running at him through the gray dawn. He made no attempt at fight, but ran at top speed towards a clump of brush not far off at the head of a creek.
Back-tracking still farther, they ascertained that the tracks had proceeded to this spot from an eminence at the head of a wooded coulie which commanded the valley where the horses had been found.
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