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Booth then crawled back, pulled out one of his revolvers, crept, or rather fell, over the "lazy-back" of the seat, and reaching the hole made by puckering the wagon-sheet, looked out of it, and counted the Indians; thirty-four feather-bedecked, paint-bedaubed savages, as vicious a set as ever scalped a white man, swooping down on them like a hawk upon a chicken.
But we was nigh enough then; and just as the Ingin was reaching down from his pony for the kid, Al Thorpe he was a powerful fine shot draw'd up his gun and took the red cuss off his critter without the paint-bedaubed devil know'n' what struck him. "The boy, seeing us, broke and run for where we was, and I reckon the rest of the Ingins seen us then for the first time, too.
"That night the paint-bedaubed pickaxe, sacred emblem of Kali's worship, lay on the table in my sleeping chamber. But in the morning it had disappeared gone how and where no one has ever discovered. The informer had been confined in the public prison, guarded by two sepoys. Thither, on discovering my loss, I straightway repaired.
Upon more than one occasion a solitary line-rider had retreated within their adobe walls and had successfully resisted all the cunning and ferocity of a score of paint-bedaubed warriors and, when his outfit had rescued him, emerged none the worse for his ordeal. On the Bar-20, Buck placed these houses in condition to withstand seige.
The wrinkled and paint-bedaubed savage veteran filled his pipe, lighted it, then taking a whiff after saluting the sky, the earth, and the cardinal points of the compass, passed it around, Indian-fashion, and began his weird story; which is here given, divested of the poor English of our interpreter:
Seeing him receive the smoke from the incense one would have said that Galen was right in averring the passage of smoke in the nasal canals to the head through a screen of ethmoids, since he straightened himself, threw his head back, and moved toward the middle of the altar with such pompousness and gravity that Capitan Tiago found him more majestic than the Chinese comedian of the night before, even though the latter had been dressed as an emperor, paint-bedaubed, with beribboned sword, stiff beard like a horse's mane, and high-soled slippers.
Out dashed the savages, gorgeous in their feathered war-bonnets, but looking like fiends with their paint-bedaubed faces. Stopping the frightened mules, they pulled open the doors of the coach and, mercilessly dragging its helpless and surprised inmates to the ground, immediately began their butchery.
Not one single custodian of the temple survived, and I stood alone in the outer courtyard, watching in idle fashion the tongues of flame licking the beams and rafters and paint-bedaubed walls of the wrecked edifice.
In a few moments a mounted Crow came riding past the camp, holding in his hand a red flag, which he waved in a furious manner, as he halted on the top of a small divide. Immediately a most diabolical yell broke forth from the opposite side of the camp where the horses were picketed, and a band of paint-bedaubed savages came rushing to where they were feeding.
"Rube, thus delivered from a sudden death, ran at the top of his speed with his two friends for the cabin, for, if they could reach it, they did not fear a hundred paint-bedaubed savages. "Luckily they arrived in time. Where they lived was part dugout and part cabin.
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