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Updated: May 31, 2025
After regarding the crucifix for awhile, I noted a circumstance that enabled me to decide which of my comrades was undergoing the terrible ordeal. To a certainty, Sure-shot was the sufferer. The Red-Hand had fulfilled his threat; and my brave preserver was now promoted to my place. The circumstance that guided me to this knowledge was sufficiently definite.
But the words that reached me explained all. On hearing them, I no longer suspected the loyalty of my old comrade. The angry expression was assumed; but the counterfeit had a design, far different from that which I had attributed to it. It was Sure-shot himself still tricky as true.
Like a jealous tigress had she watched him throughout the live-long night; and it was only in the confusion, created by our sudden approach, that he had found a chance of escape from the double guardianship in which he had been held. All this was made known to me in a few hurried phrases. Sure-shot! we were within speaking distance; but who could have identified the Yankee in such a guise?
"We got to adopt ourselves to new ways, old Sure-Shot," he ruminated aloud. "Got to quit hellin' around an' raisin' Cain. Leastways I have. You never did do any o' that. Yes, sir, I got to be a responsible citizen." The partner of the responsible citizen leaned back in a reclining chair which he had made from a plank sawed into five parts that were nailed together at angles.
The long limbs, arms, and neck the thin, angular body all were characteristics of the bodily architecture of Jephthah Bigelow. I no longer doubted that the taller of the two men was my old follower "Jeph Bigelow," or "Sure-shot," as his Ranger comrades had christened him; and appropriate was the designation for a surer shot than Jeph never looked through the hind-sights of a rifle.
"Poor Petrick!" said Sure-shot, as we descended the slope, "he weer the joyfulest kimrade I ever hed, an' we must gi' him the berril o' a Christyan. I wonder neow what on airth them verming lies done wi' him? Wheer kin they have hid his body?" "True where is it? It was out yonder on the plain? I saw it there: they had scalped him." "Yees; they sculped him at the time we weer all captered.
If the tall man should turn out to be Sure-shot, a rifle would be added to our strength worth a dozen ordinary guns; and, considering the risk we were running in danger of losing our scalps every hour in the day it was of no small importance that we should join company with the deserters.
It'll be up to us to change his mind. If you're all set, Sure-Shot, we'll drift down an' start the peace talk." Bob moistened his dry lips. "All set." They rode down the hillside, topped another rise, and descended into the draw where a camp was pitched. A young fellow chopping firewood moved forward to meet them. "There's Powder River with the broncs," Bob said in a low voice to his friend.
The current rushed rapidly on: the body would have been taken along with it? "Maybe it mout hev lodged somewheres?" suggested Sure-shot. "Ef we shed find it, capting, I'd like to put a sod over him, for old times' sake. Shell we try down the stream?" We followed the bank downward. A little below grew willows, forming a selvedge to the river's edge.
Sure-shot, though a slouch in his dress, was no simpleton. The trick of taking up the barrow was, no doubt, a conception of his brain, as well as its being borne upon the shoulders of the Irishman who, in all likelihood, had performed the role of wheeling it from Fort Smith to the Big Timbers, and was expected to push it before him to the edge of the Pacific Ocean!
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