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Updated: June 28, 2025
We determined to push on as it was now dusk, but my engine jibbed, and we worked on it in the gloom among the dark and broken houses. The men in the trenches roused themselves to a sleepless night, and intermittent rifle-shots rang out in the damp air. We rode north to the Estaminet de l'Epinette, passing a road which forking to the right led to a German barricade.
She is for the scene of 'Chillon John's' attempt to restore the respiration of his bank-book by wager; to wit, that he would walk a mile, run a mile, ride a mile, and jump ten hurdles, then score five rifle-shots at a three hundred yards' distant target within a count of minutes; twenty-five, she says; and vows it to have been one of the most exciting of scenes ever witnessed on green turf in the land of wagers; and that he was accomplishing it quite certainly when, at the first of the hurdles, a treacherous unfolding and waving of a white flag caused his horse to swerve and the loss of one minute, seven and twenty seconds, before he cleared the hurdles; after which, he had to fire his shots hurriedly, and the last counted blank, for being outside the circle of the stated time.
Even then, however, the voice of the Big Tongue could be distinguished from the rest. If the volume of sound did nothing else it deeply impressed the mind of the Apache chief with an idea of the strength of the force opposed to him. So had the promptness and number and accuracy of the rifle-shots which had prevented him from getting any report from his too treacherous "flag of truce" brave.
As to the child himself, his memory had perhaps been shaken by the events of that terrible night of massacre, which he only realized as a frightful awakening from sleep to smoke, flames, screams, the ear-splitting crack of rifle-shots at close quarters, the shock of a sudden hurt and then, after an interval of unconsciousness, a transition to a new world of strange habitudes that grew speedily familiar, and of unexpected kindness that became dear to a frank, affectionate heart.
The sharp crack of rifle-shots showed that the snipers were busy on both sides, and once I stood in a deep pool, with the water up to my knees, listening to what sounded like the tap-tap-tap of invisible blacksmiths playing a tattoo on an anvil. It was one of our machine-guns at work a few yards away from my head, which I ducked below the trench parapet.
All able-bodied males in the territory, excepting those exempt by law, were liable to military duty, and it is probable that the Mormons could have put in the field not less than seven thousand raw troops, half disciplined, indeed, but inured to hardship, and from the very nature of their environment splendid rifle-shots.
Forsyth, with Lieutenant Beecher, and Doctor J. H. Mooers as surgeon, was in charge of a company of citizen scouts, mostly expert rifle-shots, but embracing also a few Indian fighters, among these Grover and Parr.
From the nook ahead of him in which the enemy had ensconced himself came a sudden rapid rattle of rifle-shots. His friend back in the trench was doing his part. The man was awake on the alert. It would be something of a fair fight, he thought with some little satisfaction. He surveyed the intervening space beyond the coppice. The men in the trenches on both sides would be awake, too.
Not an echo of the rifle-shots, surely; no, it was the boom of a distant gun, unless the ears of all strangely deceived them. Whatever it was, the Malays also heard the sound, and, looking for an instant in consternation at each other, wavered, turned, and fled. "Hurrah!" cried Gaunt exultantly, "rescue is at hand. After the rascals, and give them a lesson they will never forget!"
He rode quietly up the valley, pausing often to listen and to scrutinize the landscape; but no sign of camp-fire and no further rifle-shots came, and at last he went into camp upon the trail, resolved to wait till the poachers appeared, a ward which his experience as a soldier helped him to maintain without nodding.
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