Last Year A Dakota Warrior
Performed A Signal Exploit At One Of These Villages.
He approached
it alone in the middle of a dark night, and clambering up the outside
of one of the lodges which are in the form of a half-sphere, he
looked in at the round hole made at the top for the escape of smoke.
The dusky light from the smoldering embers showed him the forms of
the sleeping inmates; and dropping lightly through the opening, he
unsheathed his knife, and stirring the fire coolly selected his
victims. One by one he stabbed and scalped them, when a child
suddenly awoke and screamed. He rushed from the lodge, yelled a
Sioux war-cry, shouted his name in triumph and defiance, and in a
moment had darted out upon the dark prairie, leaving the whole
village behind him in a tumult, with the howling and baying of dogs,
the screams of women and the yells of the enraged warriors.
Our friend Kearsley, as we learned on rejoining him, signalized
himself by a less bloody achievement. He and his men were good
woodsmen, and well skilled in the use of the rifle, but found
themselves wholly out of their element on the prairie. None of them
had ever seen a buffalo and they had very vague conceptions of his
nature and appearance. On the day after they reached the Platte,
looking toward a distant swell, they beheld a multitude of little
black specks in motion upon its surface.
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